Abstract
Previous research into the effects of action video gaming on cognition has suggested that long term exposure to this type of game might lead to an enhancement of cognitive skills that transfer to non-gaming cognitive tasks. However, these results have been controversial. The aim of the current study was to test the presence of positive cognitive transfer from action video games to two cognitive tasks. More specifically, this study investigated the effects that participants' expertise and genre specialization have on cognitive improvements in one task unrelated to video gaming (a flanker task) and one related task (change detection task with both control and genre-specific images). This study was unique in three ways. Firstly, it analyzed a continuum of expertise levels, which has yet to be investigated in research into the cognitive benefits of video gaming. Secondly, it explored genre-specific skill developments on these tasks by comparing Action and Strategy video game players (VGPs). Thirdly, it used a very tight experiment design, including the experimenter being blind to expertise level and genre specialization of the participant. Ninety-two university students aged between 18 and 30 (M = 21.25) were recruited through opportunistic sampling and were grouped by video game specialization and expertise level. While the results of the flanker task were consistent with previous research (i.e., effect of congruence), there was no effect of expertise, and the action gamers failed to outperform the strategy gamers. Additionally, contrary to expectation, there was no interaction between genre specialization and image type in the change detection task, again demonstrating no expertise effect. The lack of effects for game specialization and expertise goes against previous research on the positive effects of action video gaming on other cognitive tasks.
Highlights
Transfer—the extent to which skills generalize—is an important theoretical concept that has serious practical implications
One of the major conclusions of research into learning and expertise is that transfer from one domain to another is rare and difficult, and happens only when the two domains share components that ask for the same cognitive skills
A series of experiments on action video game playing have found that playing this kind of game leads to substantial transfer, in particular with tasks engaging attentional processing
Summary
Transfer—the extent to which skills generalize—is an important theoretical concept that has serious practical implications. A pianist can use their knowledge of music theory to understand a violin concerto, and a mathematician will understand the differential equations of an economics paper better than a person without background in mathematics Even in these cases, transfer is far from perfect; for example, the pianist will not be able play the violin concerto itself without extensive additional training. FAR-TRANSFER In line with Thorndike and Woodworth’s (1901) hypothesis, most theories of expertise predict that transfer from one domain to another (far-transfer) will be difficult This is the case for theories based on the notion that expertise in great part relies on domain-specific perceptual knowledge [e.g., chunking theory (Chase and Simon, 1973) and template theory (Gobet and Simon, 1996)]. Contrary to widespread belief, there is no robust empirical evidence that playing chess improves scholastic abilities (Gobet and Campitelli, 2006)
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