Size of your brain striatum predicts computer game skills.

In the fresh paper from January issue of Cerebral Cortex, authors argue that the size of your striatal volume (indicated in procedural learning and cognitive flexibility) predicts video game skill acquisition. They asked participants with different levels of gaming experience to play Space Fortress and their measured their brain volumetry using MRI. They've found that people with bigger dorsal striatum were overall better in performance and their performance improved with learning quicker than people with smaller striatum. Additionally, hippocampal areas (implicated in declarative memory) didn't predict learning improvement, suggesting lack of experience effect (interesting...). Those results suggest that there might be some major brain size effect for procedural learning and cognitive flexibility in general. I'm just wondering if there is any task specific effect related with playing computer games, so it would be nice to test participants with different other cognitive tasks (like some IQ test) to see if there is any correlation in such cases as well. You can read the paper here. Discuss ;-)