Neuroscience study incorporates children’s recognition of Pokemon

IU brain scientists Karin Harman James and Tom James were at a Bloomington toy store watching children trade Pokemon cards when they had an idea to develop a study surrounding theories in cognitive neuroscience.

“We were down at the club with our son, watching the way the kids talked about the cards, and noticed it was bigger than just a trading game,” Tom James said in a press release issued last Wednesday.

The study challenges the prevailing theory of face recognition by offering new evidence for a theory that face recognition depends on a generalized system for recognizing objects, according to a press release.

Many brain scientists agree that human beings have a highly sensitive and efficient cognitive and neural mechanism for recognizing faces, according to a press release.
Scientists typically refer to two theories on how brains process faces.
 
One of the theories maintains brains must have a face-processing module to be so efficient.

The other theory states facial recognition occurs as part of a generalized system for recognizing objects with faces.

“The fact that faces are so special causes our brains to change over time through experience and learn how to cope with this special stimulus through development,” Tom James said.

The degree to which children have studied Pokemon cards gives them expertise,  similar to that which children have with faces.

Tom said children show a quality known as Extremely Intense Interest which is comparable to a smaller level of an obsession.

The study consisted of 23 children, 10 with high knowledge of Pokemon. Each child looked at the Pokemon and Digimon cards in the study while in an fMRI scanner.

“If all this experience they have with the Pokemon characters is really changing the children’s brains, then we should see brain signals in the experts that are closer to the brain signals we see with faces,” Tom James said in a press release.

According to the study, the Pokemon experts show a strong response to Pokemon characters in areas of the brain that respond to faces.

“Those two findings are the main thrust of the argument and make it very compelling as a case for expertise over face specificity,” Tom James said.

— Matt Stefanski