Pokémon is a media franchise that dates back to 1995. It involves fictional creatures called "Pokémon."

Players have to catch and train these creatures to battle one another.

The battles are the main theme of the Pokémon games, and players have to reach certain objectives within the game.

In the '90s, children as young as 5 were playing Pokémon. Many of them continued to play later versions of the game throughout the years. These games exposed children to the same characters and rewarded them when they won battles or added a new character to the in-game encyclopedia.

Psychologists at Stanford University discovered that this repeated visual stimuli during childhood, combined with the number of hours spent in front of the screen, activates specific regions of the brain.

They have now published their findings in the journal Nature Human Behavior. The results may help shed light on some of the many questions that remain about our visual system.

"It's been an open question in the field why we have brain regions that respond to words and faces but not to, say, cars," says first study author Jesse Gomez, former Stanford University graduate student.

"It's also been a mystery why they appear in the same place in everyone's brain," he adds.

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