Brain games: Extensive action video game experience enhances globally-directed visual-attention

Abstract

Increasing data suggest that extensive action video gaming experience may lead to long-lasting benefits including improvements in visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, and visual attention. Here, we asked if the visual-attentional benefits of video-gaming experience holds when observers are asked to ignore (sometimes conflicting) local information, and selectively attend to global information. We tested twenty participants (10 video-game players; 10 non-video-game players) on an RSVP task and a letter identification task. In both tasks, stimuli were Navon figures that were congruent or incongruent. In the RSVP task, observers were asked to selectively attend to the global configuration of the stimuli, identify the initial target, and detect the presence of a second target that was present in 50% of the trials. We found that attentional blink, as quantified by impairments in detection of the second target in the RSVP stream, was significantly weaker for action video gamers than for non-gamers, in particular for the incongruent stimuli. Results from the control task indicated both groups could identify the targets (under non-RSVP conditions) comparably. These findings suggest an enhanced selective, global visual-attention capacity in video-game players, perhaps manifesting from a quicker M-pathway that has been proposed to underlie globally-directed attention processing.