( between how teens and adults operate. ...)Teenager moves video icons just by imagination

"It's exciting to be able to look at age differences and see what that tells us about the brain," said Moran, who said the team plans to test more pediatric subjects. "No one has ever seen if brain signals from children are different. We'll try to determine if teenagers have different frequency distributions when their cortex becomes active. We might question if the frequency alterations are different, will that make a difference in performance?"

Leuthardt said it is too early to make comparisons between adults and teenagers because they have only one set of teenage data.

"But we observed much quicker reaction times in the boy and he had a higher level of detail of control - for instance, he wasn't moving just left and right, but just a little bit left, a little bit right," he said.

Teamwork

Graduate students in the Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science played major roles in the accomplishment. Nick Anderson, a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering, came up with the idea of using the Space Invaders game to both help the patients pass the time away and garner some very useful, pioneering data. Computer science and engineering master's degree candidate Tim Blakely pulled several all-nighters to program the game into the ECoG system. "Doing this is a win-win situation , both for science and the child," Leuthardt said. "We devised this to be enjoyable and entertaining while we get groundbreaking information on the brain."
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Source:Washington University School of Medicine