Brain Scans Track Human Game Strategies

Using real-time MRI scans that looked for activity in the brain's reward and attention centers, researchers say they were often able to predict which people would succeed or fail at a visual game. "Before we present the task, we can use brain activity to predict with about 70 percent accuracy whether the volunteers will give a correct or an incorrect response," study lead author Ayelet Sapir, a postdoctoral research associate in neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said in a prepared statement. The game involved discriminating the direction of a field of moving dots. Eleven seconds before the volunteers did this task, they were given a hint in the form of an arrow that pointed to where the moving dots were likely to appear. However, the dots only appeared on the screen for one-fifth of a second and could easily be missed by a volunteer wasn't paying close attention. After the arrow was shown, and before the dots appeared, the volunteers' brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which revealed increased blood flow to brain regions with heightened activity. Based on these brain-activity patterns, which reflected whether or not the volunteers had used the arrow hint, the researchers found they could often predict whether a volunteer would provide the correct response. The brain's "reward centers" in the frontal lobes often lit up as individuals tried to outsmart the computer, the researchers noted.