Abstract
Recent research revealed that action video game players outperform non-players in a wide range of attentional, perceptual and cognitive tasks. Here we tested if expertise in action video games is related to differences regarding the potential of shortly presented stimuli to bias behavior. In a response priming paradigm, participants classified four animal pictures functioning as targets as being smaller or larger than a reference frame. Before each target, one of the same four animal pictures was presented as a masked prime to influence participants' responses in a congruent or incongruent way. Masked primes induced congruence effects, that is, faster responses for congruent compared to incongruent conditions, indicating processing of hardly visible primes. Results also suggested that action video game players showed a larger congruence effect than non-players for 20 ms primes, whereas there was no group difference for 60 ms primes. In addition, there was a tendency for action video game players to detect masked primes for some prime durations better than non-players. Thus, action video game expertise may be accompanied by faster and more efficient processing of shortly presented visual stimuli.
Highlights
Over the last three decades, public as well as scientific interest in action video gaming focused mainly on negative consequences such as video game addiction (e.g., Griffiths and Meredith, 2009) or promoting the likelihood of aggressive behavior (e.g., Anderson et al, 2003; Carnagey et al, 2007)
On average video game players (VGP) responded faster than nonvideo game players (NVGP) (397 vs. 427 ms), participants responded faster after primes that were presented for 20 ms compared to primes that were presented for 60 ms (405 vs. 419 ms), and participants responded faster with congruent primes compared with incongruent primes (395 vs. 429 ms)
The marginal three-way interaction was further explored in order to investigate whether the reaction times (RTs) congruence effect differed in VGPs and NVGPs for the two prime durations
Summary
Over the last three decades, public as well as scientific interest in action video gaming focused mainly on negative consequences such as video game addiction (e.g., Griffiths and Meredith, 2009) or promoting the likelihood of aggressive behavior (e.g., Anderson et al, 2003; Carnagey et al, 2007). Video game experience was associated with an increased ability to switch between two tasks (Colzato et al, 2010), enhanced monitoring and updating of working memory (Colzato et al, 2013), and improved probabilistic inference (Green et al, 2010b). These tasks are considerably different from the situation of gaming itself which suggests a substantial transfer of training
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