March 05, 2007
Virtual Reality Game Links Depression to Hippocampus
A brief report in the March 2007 American Journal of Psychiatry, describes using 3D virtual reality video games to advance our understanding of neuroanatomy and its association with clinical depression. Scientists from University College in London have been using a virtual-reality, three-dimensional video game that challenges spatial memory as a new tool for assessing the link between depression and the hippocampus, the brain's memory hub. Spatial memory is the memory of how things are oriented in space and how to get to them. Researchers found that depressed people performed poorly on the video game compared with nondepressed people, suggesting that their hippocampi were not functioning properly.
Earlier studies have shown that individuals with mood disorders tend to have memory problems and smaller hippocampi than non-depressed people. When the scientists tried a traditionally used, two-dimensional version memory test, it was not able to detect differences in spatial memory that the new video game could. The authors suggest that it is the three-dimensional aspects that engage areas of the hippocampus that the two-dimensional test does not.
Thus, the video game appers to be a more revealing measure of spatial memory and a more sensitive measure of hippocampal dysfunction and possiblly a more powerful tool for exploring the link between the hippocampus and depression. It may one day be a tool for detecting hippocampus deficits in depressed patients.
American Journal of Psychiatry Abstract