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The possibility of leveraging video games for enhancing behavior and brain function has led to an emerging new field situated at the crossroads of cognitive neuroscience, health science, educational interventions, and game design. Here we review the impact of video game play, in particular action video game play, on attentional control. We also examine the underlying neural bases of these effects and the game design features hypothesized to drive the plastic changes. We argue that not all games have the same impact, with both differences in the characteristics of the games themselves as well as individual differences in player style determining the final outcome. These facts, mixed with changes in the game industry, (e.g., greater mixing of genre characteristics; greater freedom of player experience) calls for a paradigm shift relative to the approach taken in the field to-date, including iteratively alternating between targeted game design and efficacy evaluation.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the relationship between brain and language. The typically asymmetric distribution of language functions in the brain is perhaps the most important component of the concept of hemispheric dominance or specialization. However, the lateralization of language seems to be neither consistent nor unidirectional across different linguistic levels, and much of the evidence is, to say the least, controversial. Positron emission tomography (PET) and electroencephalography (EEG) studies clearly show right-hemisphere changes in activity in homologous cortical locations to the left-hemisphere sites during all language tasks even during the simple naming tasks. It can, therefore, be concluded that there is much more to the right hemisphere's contribution to language than superficially tapped by the lesion studies. The fact that the left-hemisphere PET changes are often larger than the right-hemisphere PET changes in a language task seems a weak basis on which to assume that the change in metabolism exclusively or even primarily reflects language processing.

Children today encounter and utilize technology constantly both at home and in school. Television, DVDs, video games, the internet, cell phones and PDAs – all now play a formative role in many children’s development. Given that the term “technology” subsumes a large variety of somewhat independent items, it may not be surprising that current research indicates causes for both optimism and for concern that depend upon the content of the technology, the context in which the technology immerses the user, and the developmental stage of the user. Furthermore, because the field is still, relative to other natural sciences, in its infancy, results can be surprising. For example, video games designed to be reasonably mindless result in a widespread enhancement of various abilities, acting, we will argue, as exemplary learning tools. Counter-intuitive outcomes like these, besides being practically relevant, challenge and eventually lead to refinement of theories concerning fundamental principles of brain plasticity and learning. Thus, technology offers us a range of tools, not just for promoting certain behaviors, but also for studying the neural bases of learning and development.

Traditional theories of attention rely on the idea that when we search for a target in a visual display the brain boosts the activity of neurons optimally tuned for the target features. In this issue of Neuron, Navalpakkam and Itti take a computational approach to show that this strategy is actually very inefficient when the target is surrounded by distractors with similar features. Instead, the optimal strategy is to boost the activity of neurons that best discriminate between target and distractors, while essentially ignoring the neurons that respond best to the target.