Forwarded by a friend:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Virtual reality isn’t just fun for kids — it might also be able to help many stroke patients on their way to recovery, hints a Canadian summary of the research on the technology.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110504/hl_nm/us_virtual_reality_stroke_1

It’s a Reuters summary of a new report in the journal Stroke, which is a meta-analysis of video games for physical therapy and stroke recovery:

Virtual Reality in Stroke Rehabilitation
A Meta-Analysis and Implications for Clinicians
Gustavo Saposnik, MD, MSc, FAHA; Mindy Levin, PT, MSc, PhD; for the Stroke Outcome Research Canada (SORCan) Working Group*

From the Stroke Outcomes Research Unit (G.S.), Division of Neurology, Department of Medicine, St Michael’s Hospital, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada; and the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy (M.L.), McGill University; Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation (CRIR), Montreal, Canada.

Correspondence Gustavo Saposnik, MD, MSc, FAHA, Stroke Outcomes Research Unit, 55 Queen Street East, Suite 931, St Michael’s Hospital, University of Toronto, Toronto, M5C 1R6, Canada. E-mail saposnikg@smh.ca

Background and Purpose—Approximately two thirds of stroke survivors continue to experience motor deficits of the arm resulting in diminished quality of life. Conventional rehabilitation provides modest and sometimes delayed effects. Virtual reality (VR) technology is a novel adjunctive therapy that could be applied in neurorehabilitation. We performed a meta-analysis to determine the added benefit of VR technology on arm motor recovery after stroke.

Methods—We searched Medline, EMBASE, and Cochrane literature from 1966 to July 2010 with the terms “stroke,” “virtual reality,” and “upper arm/extremity.” We evaluated the effect of VR on motor function improvement after stroke.

Results—From the 35 studies identified, 12 met the inclusion/exclusion criteria totaling 195 participants. Among them, there were 5 randomized clinical trials and 7 observational studies with a pre-/postintervention design. Interventions were delivered within 4 to 6 weeks in 9 of the studies and within 2 to 3 weeks in the remaining 3. Eleven of 12 studies showed a significant benefit toward VR for the selected outcomes. In the pooled analysis of all 5 randomized controlled trials, the effect of VR on motor impairment (Fugl-Meyer) was OR=4.89 (95% CI, 1.31 to 18.3). No significant difference was observed for Box and Block Test or motor function. Among observational studies, there was a 14.7% (95% CI, 8.7%–23.6%) improvement in motor impairment and a 20.1% (95% CI, 11.0%–33.8%) improvement in motor function after VR.

Conclusions—VR and video game applications are novel and potentially useful technologies that can be combined with conventional rehabilitation for upper arm improvement after stroke.

http://stroke.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/42/5/1380

Portal2 released yesterday. The kids immediately downloaded it via Steam and went to work in co-operative problem solving mode. I watched for a bit a realized it’s an essentially non-violent (no shooting anyway) first-person perspective game based on puzzle-solving. But it might require the same kinds of visuo-spatial skills that get trained in the shooter games. Would practice improve general visuo-spatial skills? If the key cognitive process is maintaining an internal visual-spatial representation of a complex 3d space, I’d think the answer is yes. But it doesn’t require fast detection and responses to events in the periphery, so it’s not so clear if it would provide a training benefit.

I’d put it in the same category as the Flowers game by Jenova Chen — an interesting variant on FPS games with some potential to use in training (and avoiding the hyper violent games). To see roughly the idea, I found the trailer from the original Portal on youtube:

Portal trailer

If the hotlink works, the following is from the funnies, Sherman’s Lagoon again, that I found amusing in the theme of “not all video games are good for training” and also “video games aimed at adults and teenagers might be different.”

Red Bull has a nice series of videos with athletes performing while being recording at 1000 frames per second.

Maybe we should use these videos for pre-instruction and see if we can create some mega-athletes.

http://www.redbullusa.com/cs/Satellite/en_US/Sports/001242947016621

I was on the radio on Wednesday evening talking about memory with host Milt Rosenberg on his show Extension720.  With me was Dr. Raj Shah from the Rush ADRC.  I think it went pretty well overall, although I think I’m still learning how to talk about memory and my research in this type of way.

The podcast is available on WGN720:

http://www.wgnradio.com/shows/ext720/wgn-x720-memory,0,1015184.mp3file

I was contacted by the Alzheimer’s Forum last week to ask for comment on a paper that just came out in Neuron.

The report is:  Ludmer R, Dudai Y, Rubin N. Uncovering camouflage: amygdala activation predicts long-term memory of induced perceptual insight. Neuron. 10 March 2011;69:1002-1014. Abstract

It’s an interesting result.  How might it be related to Alzheimer’s?

http://www.alzforum.org/new/detail.asp?id=2732

(Hint: maybe a little, but probably not too much)

Today, another brief history lesson: Edward Thorndike, old-school (very: 1874 – 1949) learning and memory researcher.

From wikipedia:

Thorndike specified three conditions that maximizes learning:

• The law of effect stated that the likely recurrence of a response is generally governed by its consequence or effect generally in the form of reward or punishment.
• The law of recency stated that the most recent response is likely to govern the recurrence.
• The law of exercise stated that stimulus-response associations are strengthened through repetition.

The second two are essentially statistical — recency and repetition are very good predictors of future occurrence (this is the core of John Anderson’s Rational Analysis model of memory).  The first is the essence of reinforcement learning.  All are likely key components of the basal ganglia skill/habit learning system.

Historically speaking, there’s probably an interesting thread to draw from this type of thinking to behaviorism and then to the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and to the present.  I’ll save that for another day and leave this as another old school researcher we can find some chance to give a little intellectual credit to.

Sometimes people (including me) wonder why South Korea seems to be the international epicenter of professional competitive video game play.  While I wonder about cultural influences (thanks to Joan Chiao), it has been suggested that it is simply this:

Why you should be jealous of South Korea (link to American Prospect recap of NY Times article).

Key idea: S. Koreans all have 100Mbs internet for ~$28/month and the gov’t is co-sponsoring an initiative to get everybody up to gigbit asap.

A lot of top gamers seem to come from Sweden too, so I googled a came up with this old (2004) report:

US Broadband Penetration Crawls to 43% – Sweden Tops in Internet Penetration – February 2004 Bandwidth Report

So big deal, right?  Well, if some of these games are training generalizeable cognitive skills, how long until this kind of thing starts to produce a systemic IQ-gap?

I forget why the idea of possible gender differences in some skill learning studies came up at lab meeting, but I remember I digressed into discussion of gender differences in sciences.  Lo and behold, data on this topic are on the front page of Crooked Timber (group philosophy, politics, science blog).  And they have data!

I’ll try to hot-link Keiran Healy’s graph of Ph.D.’s awarded in 2009 broken down by field and gender:

Of note — I didn’t actually realize how far Psychology skewed, or that we are #1.  It’s hard to see that and not consider the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Psychology department that was 70-30 female:male across the faculty.  Also, I thought Neurosciences skewed male and I was wrong.  It’s about dead even.  That’s why we always need to get new data to support our occasionally biased intuitions.

Apparently everybody plays Angry Birds.  Why is it so popular?

So I downloaded the app to my iphone and have played through a few levels.  I’m not sure why it’s so sticky.  The “what happens if I try this” hook that gets you to take another shot at a difficult puzzle and gets you to try the next puzzle is pretty effective.  It vaguely reminds me of why Sid Meier’s Civilization is such a dangerous game.  Civ is the most sticky, most life-interfering game I know, but I don’t know exactly why.  You get into that loop of, “what happens if I try this?” and then you see what happens and it really captures you into trying the next thing, and the next, and then you notice 6 hours or more have gone by…

Angry Birds was originally recommended to me by a colleague at a different university (who is not really a game player).  Then my kids mentioned playing it.  Then I saw a faculty member playing around with it during downtime in a faculty meeting.  Then I saw friends recommending it for entertainment for a friend who’s laid up for a bit.  It has definitely pushed some people’s buttons.

UPDATE: I’ve been talking about how dopamine reward is maximized by unexpected success for days now and totally failed to put it together with this app until I found myself yet again think “oh, cool, I didn’t think that would work” after a surprising outcome led to beating a level.  AB has a lot of that experience.  I also feel like the best crossword puzzles do, too.  Is this the main source of pull for the puzzle games?

COgnitive Neuroscience of Gaming Alliance

I think we should form this thing. I find it amusing that we made a task inspired by video games, and other researchers are just like,

“Why bother doing more work? Just use the video game!”

Art Kramer’s stuff is apparently making its way across the tech blogosphere. Coolness.

Wired: MRI Gaming
Gizmodo: MRI scans reveal whether you’re a good gamer

The longer things progress, the more video game-like our SISL task gets. I wonder if that particular video game they used features a lot of task-specific learning, or if it’s a matter of developing little implicit, sequence-type chunks that assist in performance. Either way, it seems like implicit research and video games are a match made in nerd heaven.