Abstract
Video games are popular and ubiquitous aspects of human culture, but their relationships to psychological and neurophysiological traits have yet to be analyzed in social-evolutionary frameworks. We examined the relationships of video game usage, motivations, and preferences with autistic and schizotypal traits and two aspects of neurophysiology, reaction time and targeting time. Participants completed the Autism Quotient, Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire, a Video Game Usage Questionnaire, and two neurophysiological tasks. We tested in particular the hypotheses, motivated by theory and previous work, that: (1) participants with higher autism scores would play video games more, and participants with higher schizotypy scores would play video games less; and (2) autism and positive schizotypy would be associated with opposite patterns of video game use, preferences and motivations. Females, but not males, with higher autism scores played more video games, and exhibited evidence of relatively male-typical video game genre preferences and motivations. By contrast, positive schizotypy was associated with reduced video game use in both genders, for several measures of game use frequency. In line with previous findings, males played video game more than females did overall, preferred action video games, and exhibited faster reaction and targeting times. Females preferred Puzzle and Social Simulation games. Faster reaction and targeting times were associated with gaming motives related to skill development and building behavior. These findings show that gaming use and patterns reflect aspects of psychology, and gender, related to social cognition and imagination, as well as aspects of neurophysiology. More generally, the results suggest that video game use is notably affected by levels of autistic and schizotypal traits, and that video games may provide an evolutionarily novel medium for imaginative play in which immersive play experiences can be decoupled from social interaction.
Highlights
Why do people play? Play is a nearly universal behavior among mammals (Burghardt, 2005), but only humans have the capacity for complex and social pretend play, and for developing the multiple orders of intentionality necessary for narrative production, theory-of-mind, and abstract thinking (Nowell, 2016)
Wendt et al (2019) reported a positive genetic correlation of computer game use with autism risk, and a negative genetic correlation of computer game use with schizophrenia risk. These findings suggest that autism and schizophrenia or schizotypy may show opposite patterns of association with video game use in non-clinical populations, for reasons that have yet to be investigated
Males scored higher than females on all the variables that quantified video game usage (Supplementary Tables 1, 2)
Summary
Why do people play? Play is a nearly universal behavior among mammals (Burghardt, 2005), but only humans have the capacity for complex and social pretend play, and for developing the multiple orders of intentionality necessary for narrative production, theory-of-mind, and abstract thinking (Nowell, 2016). There is evidence that play may be considered a form of proto-creativity, which may underlie higher-order social cognitive processes including imagination, theory-of-mind, and abstract problem-solving (Vygotsky, 1967; Leslie, 1987). In both object and pretend play, there is a transitive process where children spontaneously extract or conjure abstract properties of objects, manipulate or “play” with such constructs, project them onto other entities. The transitive process of spontaneously conjuring abstract properties and manipulating them among unrelated objects is a hallmark of imagination, creativity, and divergent thinking Physical play, such as rough-and-tumble play, has been implicated in the development of social behaviors, such as dominance and cooperation (Smith and Boulton, 1990). Play appears to be a key ontogenetic developmental phase in human social cognitive development
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