Gamer Brains Cracked in Space Fortress, Scientists Predict Video Game Performance by Measuring Cerebral Regions, Larger Caudate Nucleus and Putamen Indicate Faster Skill Acquisition

Researchers can predict your performance on a video game simply by measuring the volume of specific structures in your brain, a multiinstitutional team reports this week.

The new study, published today in the journal “Cerebral Cortex,” found that nearly a quarter of the variability in achievement seen among men and women trained on a new video game could be predicted by measuring the volume of three structures in their brains. The study adds to the evidence that specific parts of the striatum, a collection of distinctive tissues tucked deep inside the cerebral cortex, profoundly influence a person's ability to refine his or her motor skills, learn new procedures, develop useful strategies, and adapt to a quickly changing environment.

“This is the first time that we've been able to take a real-world task like a video game and show that the size of specific brain regions is predictive of performance and learning rates on this video game,” said Kirk Erickson, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and the lead author on the study. Ann Graybiel, an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Arthur Kramer, a professor of psychology at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, were coprincipal investigators on the study. Walter Boot of Florida State University also contributed to the research, which was conducted at Illinois.

Research has shown that expert video gamers outperform novices on many basic measures of attention and perception, but other studies have found that training novices on video games for 20 or more hours often yields no measurable cognitive benefits.

These contradictory findings suggest that pre-existing individual differences in the brain might predict variability in learning rates, the authors wrote.

Animal studies conducted by Graybiel and others led the researchers to focus on three brain structures: the caudate (CAW-date) nucleus and the putamen (pew-TAY-min) in the dorsal striatum and the nucleus accumbens (ah-COME-bins) in the ventral striatum.

“Our animal work has shown that the striatum is a kind of learning machine-it becomes active during habit formation and skill acquisition,” Graybiel said. “So it made a lot of sense to explore whether the striatum might also be related to the ability to learn in humans.”

The caudate nucleus and putamen are involved in motor learning, but research has shown they are also important to the cognitive flexibility that allows one to quickly shift between tasks. The nucleus accumbens is known to process emotions associated with reward and punishment.

The researchers began with a basic question about these structures-Is bigger better?

They used high-resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to analyze the size of these brain regions in 39 healthy adults (aged 18-28; 10 of them male) who had spent less than three hours a week playing video games in the previous two years. The volume of each brain structure was compared to that of the brain as a whole.

Participants were then trained on one of two versions of Space Fortress, a video game developed at the University of Illinois that requires players to try to destroy a fortress without losing their own ship to one of several potential hazards.

Half of the study participants were asked to focus on maximizing their overall score in the game while also paying attention to the various components of the game.

The other participants had to periodically shift priorities, improving their skills in one area for a period of time while also maximizing their success at the other tasks.

The latter approach, called variable-priority training, encourages the kind of flexibility in decision-making that is commonly required in daily life, Kramer said. Studies have shown that variable-priority training is more likely than other training methods to improve those skills people use every day.

The researchers found that players who had a larger nucleus accumbens did better than their counterparts in the early stages of the training period, regardless of their training group. This made sense, Erickson said, because the nucleus accumbens is part of the brain's reward center, and a person's motivation for excelling at a video game includes the pleasure that results from achieving a specific goal. This sense of achievement and the emotional reward that accompanies it are likely highest in the earliest stages of learning, he said.

Players with a larger caudate nucleus and putamen did best on the variable-priority training.

“The putamen and the caudate have been implicated in learning procedures, learning new skills, and those nuclei predicted learning throughout the 20-hour period,” Kramer said. The players in which those structures were largest “learned more quickly and learned more over the training period,” he said.

“This study tells us a lot about how the brain works when it is trying to learn a complex task,” Erickson said. “We can use information about the brain to predict who is going to learn certain tasks at a more rapid rate.” Such information might be useful in education, where longer training periods may be required for some students, or in treating disability or dementia, where information about the brain regions affected by injury or disease could lead to a better understanding of the skills that might also need attention, he said.

The study was funded by the Office of Naval Research.

Neanderthals Used Body Ornamentations and Cosmetics 50,000 Years Ago Say University of Bristol Archaeologists, Study Shows Caveman Capable of Advanced Thought

The widespread view of Neanderthals as cognitively inferior to early modern humans is challenged by new research from the University of Bristol published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor João Zilhão and colleagues examined pigment-stained and perforated marine shells, most certainly used as neck pendants, from two Neanderthal-associated sites in the Murcia province of south-east Spain (Cueva de los Aviones and Cueva Antón).

The analysis of lumps of red and yellow pigments found alongside suggest they were used in cosmetics. The practice of body ornamentation is widely accepted by archaeologists as conclusive evidence for modern behaviour and symbolic thinking among early modern humans but has not been recognised in Neanderthals – until now.

Professor Zilhão said: "This is the first secure evidence that, some 50,000 years ago – ten millennia before modern humans are first recorded in Europe – the behavior of Neanderthals was symbolically organized."

A Spondylus gaederopus shell from the same site contained residues of a reddish pigmentatious mass made of lepidocrocite mixed with ground bits of hematite and pyrite (which, when fresh, have a brilliant black, reflective appearance), suggesting the kind of inclusion 'for effect' that one would expect in a cosmetic preparation.

The choice of a Spondylus shell as the container for such a complex recipe may relate to the attention-grabbing crimson, red, or violet color and exuberant sculpture of these shells, which have led to their symbolic- or ritual-related collection in a variety of archaeological contexts worldwide.

A concentration of lumps of yellow colorant from Cueva de los Aviones (most certainly the contents of a purse made of skin or other perishable material) was found to be pure natrojarosite – an iron mineral used as a cosmetic in Ancient Egypt.

While functionally similar material has been found at Neanderthal-associated sites before, it has been explained by stratigraphic mixing (which can lead to confusion about the dating of particular artifacts), Neanderthal scavenging of abandoned modern human sites, or Neanderthal imitation without understanding of behaviors observed among contemporary modern human groups.

For example, controversy has surrounded the perforated and grooved teeth and decorated bone awls found in the Châtelperronian culture of France. In earlier work, Professor Zilhão and colleagues have argued they are genuine Neanderthal artefacts which demonstrate the independent evolution of advanced cognition in the Neanderthal lineage.

However, the Châtelperronian evidence dates from 40,000 to 45,000 years ago, thus overlapping with the period when anatomically modern human people began to disperse into Europe (between 40,000 and 42,000 years ago) and leaving open the possibility that these symbolic artifacts relate, in fact, to them.

Professor Zilhão said: "The evidence from the Murcian sites removes the last clouds of uncertainty concerning the modernity of the behavior and cognition of the last Neanderthals and, by implication, shows that there is no reason any more to continue to question the Neanderthal authorship of the symbolic artifacts of the Châtelperronian culture.

"When considering the nature of the cultural and genetic exchanges that occurred between Neanderthals and modern humans at the time of contact in Europe, we should recognize that identical levels of cultural achievement had been reached by both sides."

Accurate radiocarbon dating of shell and charcoal samples from Cueva de los Aviones and Cueva Antón was crucial to the research. The dating was undertaken at the University of Oxford's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.

Dr Thomas Higham, Deputy Director of the Radiocarbon Unit in the School of Archaeology said: "Dating samples that approach the limit of the technique, at around 55,000 years before present, is a huge challenge. We used the most refined methods of pre-treatment chemistry to obtain accurate dates for the sites involved by removing small amounts of more modern carbon contamination to discover that the shells and charcoal samples were as early as 50,000 years ago."

Tokyo Electron Enhances Nano-Scale Wafer Inspection with Photonic Nanojet Metrology System

With the current drive towards smaller geometries of integrated circuit (IC) devices, measurement of IC device features is increasingly difficult as the features become smaller. Optical microscopy and spectroscopy technologies are well established. However, there are fundamental limitations of conventional optical microscopy.  Tokyo Electron's photonic metrology system overcomes these limitations with microsphere-generated nanojets which are unaffected by the diffraction of light which limits wafer inspection by conventional optical microscopy.  

In U.S. Patent 7,639,351 Tokyo Electron Limited (Tokyo, JP) inventors Zhigang Chen, Hanyou Chu, Shifang Li, and Manuel Madriaga  (San Jose, CA) detail the operations of a photonic nanojet metrology system which is able to detect nanoscale structures and defects on a wafer when manufacturing semiconductor devices with higher resolution than can be obtained using conventional methods.   

The inspected structure can be any isolated, nonperiodic, or periodic object formed on the semiconductor wafer, such as a gate, line, contact hole, via, drain, periodic structure, and the like. Additionally, the structure can be foreign matter, such as a contaminating particle.  

By determining the existence of the structure, the fabrication process can be evaluated. For example, if a structure is intended to be formed in a specific location on the wafer, the specific location can be examined to determine if the structure exists. If the structure does not exist, then a fault in the fabrication process can be detected.   

Alternatively, if a specific location on the wafer should be unpatterned, then the specific location can be examined to determine if a structure, including a contaminating particle, exists. If the structure exists, then a fault in the fabrication process or contamination of the fabrication process can be detected.  

A metrology system using a photonic nanojet can strongly interact with nanoscale particles and structures and cause several orders-of-magnitude enhancements in the backscattered signature from the nanoscale structures. Further computational investigation of the photonic nanojets has confirmed that photonic nanojets do greatly enhance the effective backscattering of light by nanometer-scale dielectric particles located within the nanojets.   

 This backscattering enhancement for nanoparticles exists for the nanojets generated by both microcylinders and microspheres. The only difference is that the order of magnitude of the enhancement is much higher in the case of microsphere-generated nanojets than in the case of microcylinder-generated nanojets.  

The inventors note that nanojet-inducing dielectric microsphere analysis differs significantly from the traditional microlens in terms of physical mechanisms.  A photonic nanojet system is a backscattering-detection system  as opposed to an imaging lens system. As a result, it is not affected by the usual diffraction limit. The effective backscattering of the nearby nanosphere is enhanced by the mutual interaction between the nano and microspheres.   

 The nanoparticle is first excited by the photonic nanojet emerging from the microsphere, and its scattering intensity is elevated by two orders of magnitudes, as determined by the intensity of the nanojet. The scattered fields generated by the nanojet-excited nanoparticle propagate into the microsphere, which leads to non-Rayleigh backscattering of light by the nanoparticle as part of the combined system. This interaction elevates the backscattered intensity from the nanojet-excited nanoparticle by four to nine additional orders of magnitude.  

The Tokyo Electron method of controlling a fabrication cluster using photonic nanojet optical metrology includes: performing a fabricating process on a wafer using a first fabrication cluster; generating a photonic nanojet, wherein the photonic nanojet is an optical intensity pattern induced at a shadow-side surface of a dielectric microsphere; scanning an inspection area on the wafer with the photonic nanojet; obtaining a measurement of retroreflected light from the dielectric microsphere as the inspection area is scanned with the photonic nanojet; determining the existence of a structure in the inspection area with the obtained measurement of the retroreflected light; and adjusting one or more process parameters of the first fabrication cluster based on the determination of the existence of the structure in the inspection area. 

A measurement is obtained of the retroreflected light from the dielectric microsphere as the photonic nanojet scans the inspection area. The existence of a structure in the inspection area is determined with the obtained measurement of the retroreflected light. One or more process parameters of the fabrication cluster may be adjusted based on the determination of the existence of the structure in the inspection area. 

In the case of imaging objects with optical fields propagating in the far-field zone, the fundamental constraint is the diffraction of light that limits conventional optical microscopy to a spatial resolution comparable to one-half wavelength, or about 200 nm for visible light. As problems of interest push further into the nanometric regime, the importance of imaging techniques that allow nanoscale resolution or sensitivity has been steadily increasing. 

FIG. 2 is an architectural diagram of a photonic nanojet metrology system.

FIGS. 3a-c illustrates the evolution of a photonic nanojet.

FIG. 11 is a flow diagram illustrating a Tokyo Electron process of controlling a fabrication cluster using photonic nanojet optical metrology.  

Bruker Improves N8 TITANOS Atomic Force Microscope for Metrology and Nanofabrication

Bruker's N8 TITANOS Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) is capable of inspecting large wafers, for metrology on solar panels, photolithography masks, flat panel displays, etc.

Bruker Nano (Aachen, Germany) reports its N8 TITANOS™ large-sample inspection AFM has been further improved to provide highest spatial resolving power. Due to its unique AFM technology and outstanding mechanical stability, the TITANOS has now been demonstrated with atomic-scale resolution on HOPG (highly oriented pyrolythic graphite) on a production instrument in standard configuration. The TITANOS has proven itself once again as the most precise and stable AFM platform for large samples up to 300 mm diameter.

The N8 TITANOS has been developed for the inspection of 300 mm wafers, and it is also in use for metrology on solar panels, photolithography masks, flat panel displays, etc. The TITANOS’ ultra-precise xy-positioning stage employs contact-less linear motors, high-resolution glass encoders and an air bearing for fast, reproducible sample movement. The TITANOS AFM is mounted on a solid granite bridge above the platform.

All AFM systems offered by Bruker Nano employ Fiber Optic Interferometry (FOI) detection as a unique feature to achieve outstanding resolution even on large samples. “FOI provides superior sensitivity as well as a calibrated deflection,” explains Dr. Hans Achim Fuss, Bruker Nano’s AFM Chief Technology Officer. “The results obtained with our AFMs are highly reproducible due to the exact knowledge of all crucial parameters.”

Dr. Frank Saurenbach, Vice President for AFM at Bruker Nano commented further: “It is incredible to see the TITANOS’ stage move hundreds of millimeters in seconds, and then operate with such stability and record resolution at each new measuring position. We are excited to supply the large sample AFM tool with the highest resolving power available on the market”.

The N8 TITANOS can be used as a stand-alone, automated system or combined with a high-performance optical microscope. It comes as a fully accessible R&D tool, or can be upgraded to an at-line production inspection system.

Buker Nano is a business unit of the Bruker AXS division. For more information about Bruker Nano and Bruker Corporation (NASDAQ: BRKR), please visit www.bruker.com

Bruker Nano Business Marketing Communications Manager Stefan Langner, +49 (30) 670990-802 stefan.langner@bruker-axs.de