Abstract
It is well established that attention can be captured by salient distractors. Some studies have found that action video game players were less susceptible to attention capture by irrelevant distractors than non-players. Other studies have also found that individuals with greater visual working memory capacity are less susceptible to capture by irrelevant distractors than individuals with lower visual working memory capacity. The present study examined whether action video game players were less susceptible to be captured by salient distractors and, if so, whether that relationship was due to greater visual working memory capacity. Participants completed a questionnaire reporting their video game playing experience, followed by a color change detection task assessing their visual working memory capacity. They then performed an attention capture task, where they determined the orientation of a bar within a shape singleton while attempting to ignore a color singleton distractor that appeared in 50% of the trials. Results showed that action video game players did not produce less capture effect than non-action video game players. However, high visual working memory capacity individuals produced less capture effect than low visual working memory capacity individuals regardless of their video game experience. These results suggest that the ability to resist capture by irrelevant distractors may be better explained by individual differences in visual working memory capacity than by action video game experience.
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Notes
In our participant recruitment site, we specifically indicated a requirement of computer monitor with a resolution of 1920 × 1080. Participants were instructed to run the studies in a quiet environment.
We also used median split on the total hours of video game play per week to classify participants to either the video game group (N = 65) or non-video game group (N = 65). A mixed ANOVA was conducted on RT and accuracy as a function of video game group and distractor condition (present vs. absent; a within-subject variable). Results were similar to analyses on data with the splitting of the action video game experience by a fixed criterion. The interaction between group and distractor condition was still not significant on RT, F < 1.0. The capture effect on RT was similar for the video game group (70 ± 12 ms) and the non-video game group (74 ± 13 ms). Again, no effect was found on accuracy.
A hierarchical regression analysis on accuracy data showed none of the models to be significant, Fs < 1.0.
We also examined the relationship between capture effect, K value, and the number of hours on only action video game playing. None of the correlations were significant, |rs(88)| 0.19, ps ≥ 0. 07.
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Acknowledgements
All data in this article are available on Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/rydbu/. We thank Megan Griffin for assistance in data collection and Emily Burgess and Eric Ruthruff for helpful comments on drafts of this article. We also thank Ulrich Ansorge and Keisuke Fukuda for helpful feedback.
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Appendix A
Appendix A
Video game experience questionnaire
On average, how many hours do you spend per week playing the following types of video games?
Video Game Genre | Examples |
|---|---|
First person shooter | (Ex-Counter Strike, Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege) |
Massively multiplayer online | (Ex-World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV) |
Multiplayer online battle arena | (Ex-League of Legends, Dota 2, Heroes of the Storm) |
Role playing games | (Ex-The Witcher, Dark Souls, Skyrim) |
Real time strategy | (Starcraft, Age of Empires, Warcraft 3) |
Puzzle games | (Ex-Tetris, Candy Crush, Bejeweled) |
Other | (Open text field for participants to write in) |
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Hauck, C., Lien, MC. The role of visual working memory capacity in attention capture among video game players. Psychological Research 86, 2128–2143 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01640-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01640-0