Video Game Playing Effect Essay

In 2003, Green and Bavelier proved that action video games can modify visual selective attention. They conducted five experiments to test whether habitual video game players (VGPs) would outperform non-video game players (NVGPs) on a variety of visual attention tasks. In their first experiment, the aim was to determine whether video game playing results in an overall increase of attentional capacity. To do so they used the “flanker compatibility effect”, which is a standard experimental paradigm used in numerous studies on attention (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974). During the experiment, the effect of a distractor that should be ignored, was measured. The theoretical foundation this experiment was based on is that when a task is relatively easy,

This task is based on the fact that if a number of targets one has to attend to becomes larger, the slower and more serial the counting process of these targets will become (Kaufman, Lord, Reese, & Volkman, 1949). Therefore, the amount of targets that can still be counted in a rapid, accurate, and confident fashion (also called “subitizing”), should provide an estimate of the amount of items one can attend to at once (Trick & Pylyshyn, 1993, 1994; Tuholski, Engle, & Baylis, 2001). The results of the task showed that VGPs could subitize significantly more items than NVPGs, thereby indicating that playing video games increases the amount of items in the visual field that can be processed rapidly and without error. In a third experiment, it was tested whether playing video games also improves visual attentional processing outside the training range used in the former two experiments. For this experiment the so-called “useful field of view” task was applied. This task measures the ability of an individual to locate a target surrounded by distractors (Ball, Beard, Roenker, Miller, & Griggs, 1988; Myers, Ball, Kalina, Roth, & Goode, 2000; Ball, Owsley, Sloane, Roenker, & Bruni, 1993). It therefore provides a way of measuring attentional resources along with their spatial distribution (Ball et al., 1988). Once again, the VGPs greatly outperformed the NVPGs on all aspects of the task. Thus, these findings demonstrate that VGPs possess a superior spatial attention over their visual field both at trained and untrained locations. Taken together, the thus far mentioned results from the first three experiments showed that playing video games results in an enhanced visual attentional capacity along with its spatial distribution. During the fourth experiment, the temporal characteristics of visual attention were examined the main