In 2015 the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review published an article titled: Action video games and improved attentional control: Disentangling selection- and response-based processes, which is authored by Joseph D. Chisholm and Alan Kingstone. The authors decided to use a combination of older research and their own experiments to show whether or not gamers had better cognition because of their gaming habits and if so to what extent?
Chisholm and Kingstone started their article by establishing that they would specifically be focusing on action video game players (AVGP) as their testing population because action video games have shown in the past to give players the most cognitive and visual benefits over other genres. This is thought to be because
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Of this population 28 were AVGP’s (they played an average of 8 hours of action games a week) and 29 were NVGP’s (they played no action video games and played an average of an hour of non action video games a week). Chisholm and Kingstone decided to use a modified version of their 2012 test in order to achieve their data set for this study. This test was considered a simple search task where participants were instructed to look at different images for a target displaying a certain attribute, such as color or shape, while it was surrounded by distractors or things not displaying these attributes and asked if the target remained in the same place in consecutive images regardless of where the distractors moved. (Chisholm & Kingstone, 2015). The new test asked participants to search an invisible ring of six circles for the grey target circle among the blue non-target circles while an EyeLink 1000 scanned their eyes for movement and measured their reflexes. As an added challenge the circles each had a black square in the middle and the square within the grey circle had triangular indents show up on either the left or the right side of the center. Also during some of the trials an extra distractor would pop up somewhere in the ring. Participants were required to input a physical response via a standard mouse as to which side of the target square the indentation showed up on. (Chisholm & Kingstone,