Video Game May Detect Depression
Tuesday March 13, 2007
Could a video game help doctors diagnose depression? It sounds crazy, but Neda Gould and colleagues at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland think it could work. Depression has been linked to a shrunken hippocampus, the area of the brain associated with spatial memory. Because of this, the researchers wondered if a video game designed to test spatial memory could be used to gauge the severity of a person's depression.
To test their idea, they developed a video game with scenes from the popular game Duke Nukem and the participants were asked to navigate their way around its virtual town. They were asked to find their way to as many landmarks as possible within a set period of time. Depressed people found their way to an average of 2.4 landmarks, while the healthy control group found an average of 3.8 landmarks. In fact, the more depressed a person was, the fewer landmarks they were able to find.
Gould hopes the test may eventually become a way to quantify a person's level of depression.
The study was published in the March issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry.
Comments
Great article… Hope this works
I have never heard such garbage. I have suffered depression for years and my spatial memory is better than everyone’s I know – who don’t suffer from depression.
Is the spatial relationships or that the depressed people might be inclined to become frustrated with such a game more easily? And in all seriousness, would “Where’s Waldo?” detect a similar likelihood of depression?
guess if this is true I couldn’t find any or my way home either.
ha! I used to play Duke Nukem. Any chance I could get a copy of their game?
Something tells me there’s more going on than what this simple article let on to. I’ve played several first-person games, and there’s plenty of spatial stuff going on – that’s what makes it so fun.
You fight your way thru some tunnel and get to a balcony, and you look out and go Hey, this is that balcony where that grenade guy was shooting at me from, back when I was down There. Oh, and here’s his remains after I blew him away, right here on the floor. Yep, this is definitely the place.
These spaces are totally 3d. I’ve swum through water, lava and liquid ‘radioactive waste’ to get from point A to point B. Moved large blocks along the floor so I could hop across them and not get elecrocuted by the puddle of water on the floor with the wire in it and lightning bolts coming from it. You’re searching for a way to make this or that door open, so over and over again you’re running through laboratories, up ladders, into the ‘reaction chamber’ where you have to throw a grenade down there to distract the monsters so you can scamper down the other ladder and into the laboratory on the next floor, because that’s the only way to get there.
One part of HalfLife took place on a mountainside. You came out of a tunnel and there was this thin trail you had to walk along, uphill on one side was too steep to climb, and downhill on the other side, you would fall, bounce a few times and die. The mountainside woudl be convex or concave and sometimes you’d come upon bad guys. I think the trick was to find a trail that went above the bad guys and roll grenades down the mountainside and listen for if you hit them.
Marathon and many others had public domain floor-editors, where you could make your own rooms, tunnels, pools, whatever, and fill them with aliens. Marathon had a design issue where you could have two rooms or tunnels that occcupied the same location, but a player inside one wouldn’t see the other – you had to explicitly connect them in the floor editor for them to be connected from the player’s perspective. One level they made had a room with eight east-west hallways and eight north-south hallways, and they were connected in a confusing way so you would sortof go around the block and be in a different location.
OK so why is it that the researchers “developed a video game with scenes from the popular game Duke Nukem” – did they take the DN game and use one of these floor editors and make their own spaces? Or did they actually make a whole new game and just rip off ’scenes’?
maybe depressed people just don’t care how well they do.
hey was up? i am tryin to learn why kids are so depress can u give me an answer are a statement O and srry about my e-mail adderess