Researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, used video games to test how healthy adults learned and performed quickly changing tasks. The participants' brains were analyzed with high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging.
The results showed nearly 25 percent of the variability in achievement could be predicted by measuring the volume of three areas of the brain: the caudate nucleus and the putamen in the dorsal striatum and the nucleus accumbens in the ventral striatum.
Those areas of the cerebral cortex influence how the brain works when it is trying to learn a complex task, said Kirk Erickson, a University of Pittsburgh professor of psychology who worked on the study in Illinois.
"We can use information about the brain to predict who is going to learn certain tasks at a more rapid rate," Erickson said, adding such information could be useful in treating disability or dementia and in education where longer training periods are required for some students.
Copyright 2010 by United Press International.
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