Gomez recruited 11 Pokémon experts for his experiment (mean age 29.5 years), along with 11 Pokémon novices who had never played the game, for comparison. While undergoing fMRI, the subjects were shown images of faces, animals, cartoons, bodies, words, cars, corridors, and Pokémon. The Pokémon experts responded more strongly to images of the Pokémon characters than the control group.
When they analyzed the data, Gomez et al. found that, as hypothesized, there was a new region of the brain that formed in the subjects, dedicated to recognizing Pokémon characters, in the same location across the Pokémon-playing subjects. According to Gomez, this supports a theory called "eccentricity bias." It holds that it's the way we look at visual stimuli—specifically, whether we use central or peripheral vision—and how much of our visual field a given object takes up, that determines the location for a dedicated brain region for that stimulus.
A lot more at https://arstechnica.com/science/201...emon-characters-if-you-played-a-lot-as-a-kid/