A child-friendly action video game to support learning

With this in mind, a video game was designed that combines action video games with mini games that train different executive functions, such as working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility, functions that are called upon during reading. “The universe of this game is an alternative world in which the child, accompanied by his Raku, a flying creature, must carry out different missions to save planets and progress in the game,” Angela Pasqualotto adds. The idea is to reproduce the components of an action game, without incorporating violence, so that it is suitable for young children. “For example, the Raku flies through a meteor shower, moving around to avoid those or aiming at them to weaken their impact, while collecting useful resources for the rest of the game, a bit like what you find in action video games.”

The scientists then worked with 150 Italian schoolchildren aged 8 to 12, divided into two groups: the first one played the video game developed by the team, and the second one played Scratch, a game that teaches children how to code. Both games require attentional control and executive functions, but in different manners. The action video game requires children to perform tasks within a time limit such as remembering a sequence of symbols or responding only when the Raku makes a specific sound while increasing the difficulty of these tasks according to the child’s performance. Scratch, the control game, requires planning, reasoning and problem solving. Children must manipulate objects and logical structures to establish the desired programming sequence.

“First, we tested the children’s ability to read words, non-words and paragraphs, and also we conducted an attention test that measures the child’s attentional control, a capacity we know is trained by action video games,” explains Daphne Bavelier. The children then followed the training with either the action video game or the control game, for six weeks, two hours a week under supervision at school. Children were tested at school by clinicians of the Laboratory of Observation Diagnosis and Education (UNITN).

Long-term improvement in reading skills

Shortly after the end of the training, the scientists repeated the tests on both groups of children. “We found a 7-fold improvement in attentional control in the children who played the action video game compared to the control group,” says Angela Pasqualotto. Even more remarkably, the research team observed a clear enhancement in reading, not only in terms of reading speed, but also in accuracy, whereas no improvement was noted for the control group. This improvement in literacy occurs even though the action video game does not require any reading activity.

“What is particularly interesting about this study is that we carried out three further assessment tests at 6 months, 12 months and 18 months after training. On each occasion, the trained children performed better than the control group, which proves that these improvements were sustained,” Angela Pasqualotto says. Moreover, the grades in Italian of the trained children became significantly better over time, showing a virtuous improvement in learning ability. “The effects are thus long-term, in line with the action video game strengthening the ability to learn how to learn,” says Daphne Bavelier.

Within the framework of the NCCR Evolving Language and in collaboration with Irene Altarelli (co-author of the article and researcher at LaPsyDE, University of Paris), the game will be adapted into German, French and English. “When reading, decoding is more or less difficult depending on the language. Italian, for example, is very transparent — each letter is pronounced — whereas French and English are quite opaque, resulting in rather different learning challenges. Reading in opaque languages requires the ability to learn exceptions, to learn how a variety of contexts impacts pronunciation and demands greater reliance on memorization,” comments Irene Altarelli. Will the benefits of action video games on reading acquisition extend to such complex learning environments as reading in French or English? This is the question that this study will help answer. In addition, the video game will be available entirely at home, remotely, as will the administration of reading and attention tests, in order to complement school lessons, rather than taking time out of school hours.

Pancreatic islets control insulin production when blood sugar levels change, and in Type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune system attacks and destroys such insulin-producing cells. Islet transplantation has emerged over the past few decades as a potential cure for Type 1 diabetes. With healthy transplanted islets, Type 1 diabetes patients may no longer need insulin injections, but transplantation efforts have faced setbacks as the immune system continues to eventually reject new islets. Current immunosuppressive drugs offer inadequate protection for transplanted cells and tissues and are plagued by undesirable side effects.

Now a team of researchers at Northwestern University has discovered a technique to help make immunomodulation more effective. The method uses nanocarriers to re-engineer the commonly used immunosuppressant rapamycin. Using these rapamycin-loaded nanocarriers, the researchers generated a new form of immunosuppression capable of targeting specific cells related to the transplant without suppressing wider immune responses.

The paper was published today (Jan. 17), in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The Northwestern team is led by Evan Scott, the Kay Davis Professor and an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Guillermo Ameer, the Daniel Hale Williams Professor of Biomedical Engineering at McCormick and Surgery at Feinberg. Ameer also serves as the director of the Center for Advanced Regenerative Engineering (CARE).

Specifying the body’s attack

Ameer has been working on improving the outcomes of islet transplantation by providing islets with an engineered environment, using biomaterials to optimize their survival and function. However, problems associated with traditional systemic immunosuppression remain a barrier to the clinical management of patients and must also be addressed to truly have an impact on their care, said Ameer.

“This was an opportunity to partner with Evan Scott, a leader in immunoengineering, and engage in a convergence research collaboration that was well executed with tremendous attention to detail by Jacqueline Burke, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow,” Ameer said.

Rapamycin is well-studied and commonly used to suppress immune responses during other types of treatment and transplants, notable for its wide range of effects on many cell types throughout the body. Typically delivered orally, rapamycin’s dosage must be carefully monitored to prevent toxic effects. Yet, at lower doses it has poor effectiveness in cases such as islet transplantation.

Scott, also a member of CARE, said he wanted to see how the drug could be enhanced by putting it in a nanoparticle and “controlling where it goes within the body.”

“To avoid the broad effects of rapamycin during treatment, the drug is typically given at low dosages and via specific routes of administration, mainly orally,” Scott said. “But in the case of a transplant, you have to give enough rapamycin to systemically suppress T cells, which can have significant side effects like hair loss, mouth sores and an overall weakened immune system.”

Following a transplant, immune cells, called T cells, will reject newly introduced foreign cells and tissues. Immunosuppressants are used to inhibit this effect but can also impact the body’s ability to fight other infections by shutting down T cells across the body. But the team formulated the nanocarrier and drug mixture to have a more specific effect. Instead of directly modulating T cells — the most common therapeutic target of rapamycin — the nanoparticle would be designed to target and modify antigen presenting cells (APCs) that allow for more targeted, controlled immunosuppression.

Using nanoparticles also enabled the team to deliver rapamycin through a subcutaneous injection, which they discovered uses a different metabolic pathway to avoid extensive drug loss that occurs in the liver following oral administration. This route of administration requires significantly less rapamycin to be effective — about half the standard dose.

“We wondered, can rapamycin be re-engineered to avoid non-specific suppression of T cells and instead stimulate a tolerogenic pathway by delivering the drug to different types of immune cells?” Scott said. “By changing the cell types that are targeted, we actually changed the way that immunosuppression was achieved.”

A ‘pipe dream’ come true in diabetes research

The team tested the hypothesis on mice, introducing diabetes to the population before treating them with a combination of islet transplantation and rapamycin, delivered via the standard Rapamune® oral regimen and their nanocarrier formulation. Beginning the day before transplantation, mice were given injections of the altered drug and continued injections every three days for two weeks.

The team observed minimal side effects in the mice and found the diabetes was eradicated for the length of their 100-day trial; but the treatment should last the transplant’s lifespan. The team also demonstrated the population of mice treated with the nano-delivered drug had a “robust immune response” compared to mice given standard treatments of the drug.

The concept of enhancing and controlling side effects of drugs via nanodelivery is not a new one, Scott said. “But here we’re not enhancing an effect, we are changing it — by repurposing the biochemical pathway of a drug, in this case mTOR inhibition by rapamycin, we are generating a totally different cellular response.”

The team’s discovery could have far-reaching implications. “This approach can be applied to other transplanted tissues and organs, opening up new research areas and options for patients,” Ameer said. “We are now working on taking these very exciting results one step closer to clinical use.”

Jacqueline Burke, the first author on the study and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and researcher working with Scott and Ameer at CARE, said she could hardly believe her readings when she saw the mice’s blood sugar plummet from highly diabetic levels to an even number. She kept double-checking to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, but saw the number sustained over the course of months.

Research hits close to home

For Burke, a doctoral candidate studying biomedical engineering, the research hits closer to home. Burke is one such individual for whom daily shots are a well-known part of her life. She was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was nine, and for a long time knew she wanted to somehow contribute to the field.

“At my past program, I worked on wound healing for diabetic foot ulcers, which are a complication of Type 1 diabetes,” Burke said. “As someone who’s 26, I never really want to get there, so I felt like a better strategy would be to focus on how we can treat diabetes now in a more succinct way that mimics the natural occurrences of the pancreas in a non-diabetic person.”

The all-Northwestern research team has been working on experiments and publishing studies on islet transplantation for three years, and both Burke and Scott say the work they just published could have been broken into two or three papers. What they’ve published now, though, they consider a breakthrough and say it could have major implications on the future of diabetes research.

Scott has begun the process of patenting the method and collaborating with industrial partners to ultimately move it into the clinical trials stage. Commercializing his work would address the remaining issues that have arisen for new technologies like Vertex’s stem-cell derived pancreatic islets for diabetes treatment.

Scientists turned to the next best thing: bio-logging devices that can be attached to animals and capture information about movement, breathing rate, heart rate, and more.

However, retrieving an accurate picture of what a tagged animal does as it journeys through its environment requires statistical analysis, especially when it comes to animal movement, and the methods statisticians use are always evolving to make full use of the large and complex data sets that are available.

A recent study by researchers at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF) and the UBC department of statistics has taken us a step closer to understanding the behaviours of northern resident killer whales by improving statistical tools useful for identifying animal behaviours that can’t be observed directly.

“The thing we really tackled with this paper was trying to get at some of those fine-scale behaviours that aren’t that easy to model,” said Evan Sidrow, a doctoral student in the department of statistics and the study’s lead author. “It’s a matter of finding behaviours on the order of seconds — maybe 10 to 15 seconds. Usually, it’s a matter of a whale looking around, and then actively swimming for a second to get over to a new location. We are trying to observe fleeting behaviours, like a whale catching a fish.”

The research team improved a statistical tool that is based on what is called a hidden Markov model, which is helpful for unlocking the mysteries hidden inside animal movement datasets.

“Traditional hidden Markov models break down at very fine scales,” Sidrow said. “That’s because there’s structure in the data you can’t capture using the basic type of hidden Markov model. We’re trying to capture it with this model — we’re trying to account for this ‘wigglyness’ that a traditional hidden Markov model wouldn’t be able to account for.”

In other words, now that tags can collect data almost continuously, researchers are left with an immense number of data points taken fractions of seconds apart, and traditional Markov models and statistical methods struggle to interpret such high-frequency information — hence the need for the more advanced Markov model proposed in the study.

Using the enhanced hidden Markov models, the team found some undiscovered northern resident killer whale behaviours. The whale they used to develop the model preferred to save energy by gliding through the water when making deep dives, and when it was closer to the surface, it moved more actively, accelerating faster and ‘fluking’ its tail more often.

Understanding these diving patterns will be crucial for whale conservation because it will help researchers learn how much energy the whales require to sustain themselves.

And the method’s applications extend far beyond whale movement data, according to Sidrow.

“It could be applied to pretty much any animal movement data,” he said. “If you’re tagging animals and you want to understand fine-scale behaviours, then this method that could be useful — even for things like the flapping of birds’ wings.”

It could even prove useful in areas outside of ecology, such as determining when machines are likely to break by classifying when the parts inside of them are vibrating abnormally.

The work is one of the first steps on the road to fully understanding why southern resident killer whales are not faring as well as their northern counterparts, according to Dr. Marie Auger-Méthé, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in the department of statistics and the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries.

“Using our methods to detect when the animals are catching prey and to model their energy expenditure will be key to understanding the differences between these neighbouring whale populations,” she said.

The next goal is to understand when the whales are capturing prey and applying the models to both northern and southern resident killer whale populations to see how they are behaving differently.

“The paper offers many ‘building block’ solutions that can be used together or independently,” Dr. Auger-Méthé said. “In essence, we are providing a toolbox to researchers using high-frequency movement data, and other similar high-frequency time series.”

Additionally, the research team found that the more experience the individuals had with such events, the lower their mental health was.

“We discovered the reverse of the adage ‘what does not kill you makes you stronger,'” said the study’s lead author Garett Sansom, research assistant professor in the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health at the School of Public Health.

Sansom and a team of Texas A&M researchers studied individuals from the Houston area, which is susceptible to hurricanes and flooding as well as industrial emergencies. The results of the study were published recently in the journal Natural Hazards.

From 2000 to 2020, Texas — one of the states most prone to natural disasters — experienced 33 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) declared major disasters. Many of these — hurricanes, winter weather, drought and flooding — impacted the Houston area. The area has also been impacted by emergencies such as explosions and chemical releases at nearby industrial facilities.

According to the research team, the combination of natural disasters and emergencies from industrial facilities presents a unique opportunity to observe the impacts.

“There is an unfortunate truth that many communities that reside along the Gulf Coast are at the nexus of exposures from natural and anthropogenic, or human-caused, hazards,” Sansom said.

The team used a 12-item short form health survey to gather information. The survey assessed cumulative impacts from exposure to evaluate changes over time, producing a composite score for both mental (MCS) and physical (PCS) health.

The majority of the respondents reported that they experienced many hazardous events over the past five years. Hurricanes and flooding (96.35 percent) were the events experienced the most, followed by industrial fires (96.08), chemical spills (86.84) and tornados (79.82).

The team found that when individuals experienced two or more events over the past five years, their MCS averages fell below the expected national levels.

“Mental health is often overlooked in responding to and preparing for hazard exposures,” Sansom said. “However, in order to reach community resilience efforts, mental conditions need to be accounted for.”

The results of the study help to reveal the long-term mental impact hazards can have. More importantly, they underscore the need for public health interventions targeted toward these individuals as well as the communities where they reside.

Sansom’s co-authors include Courtney Thompson and Lindsay Sansom, both from the Texas A&M University Department of Geography, Leanne Fawkes, graduate research assistant in Environmental & Occupational Health, and Elizabeth Boerlin, doctoral student in Occupational Safety and Health.

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Materials provided by Texas A&M University. Original written by Tim Schnettler. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.