In games, brains work differently when playing vs. a human
At its simplest, winning most games comes down to one thing: outsmarting your opponent. One of the appeals of networked games, however, is that doing so is generally considered to be much more challenging when your opponent is a human instead of a machine. Even the best algorithms can fall into predictable patterns, and few of them are able to recognize any habits that human players fall into. A new, open access study describes how the brain activity of subjects changed based on whether they thought they were playing a human or not, and that this difference is influenced by the sex of the subject.
The paper itself has a provocative title, starting with the question, "Are women better mindreaders?" The answer, I'd argue, isn't actually contained in the text, which appears to suffer a bit from some overinterpretation of the data and a discussion that casually accepts some gender clichés. Nevertheless, the basic data appear to be solid, even if their interpretation isn't.
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