Action Video-Game Training and Its Effects on Perception and Attentional Control
Over the past four decades, video games have become a ubiquitous part of modern culture. Interestingly, although such games have often been thought of as mindless entertainment, a substantial body of research has demonstrated that video games have the pot
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Introduction Over the past 40 years, video game play has grown from a niche activity into a pervasive and abundant part of modern life. Over half of the United States population now plays video games, with over 130 million of these individuals being considered “regular” video game players (i.e., playing more than 3 h of video games per week—ESA 2015). And although video games were originally, and for the most part continue to be, an entertainment medium, there has nonetheless been significant scientific interest in the possibility that video gaming may have significant effects on the human brain and human behavior. While much of this research has focused on potential negative outcomes (e.g., effects related to aggression or addiction—Anderson et al. 2010), there exists a growing body of research outlining positive effects of video game play as well. This chapter will specifically focus on the positive impact that playing one particular type of video game, known as “action video games,” has on perceptual and attentional skills.
The “Curse of Specificity” Before discussing the various effects associated with action video game play, it is worth considering why it is interesting in the first place that something like video game play could alter core perceptual or attentional abilities. Indeed, one’s first C.S. Green (*) • T. Gorman Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] D. Bavelier Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 T. Strobach, J. Karbach (eds.), Cognitive Training, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42662-4_10
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intuition might be that, “Many video games place extreme demands on the perceptual and attentional systems—wouldn’t it make sense that playing these games would lead to such benefits?”. Interestingly though, such an intuition runs counter to the effects seen in many classic perceptual training experiments, wherein individuals were trained by repeatedly practicing a single perceptual task. It is certainly the case that, when given appropriate training, humans will tend to improve their performance on most tasks. However, it is typically the case that these improvements fail to generalize to new contexts or situations. For instance, in one classic experiment, participants were trained to identify two complex visual gratings. Although participants quickly learned this task, when seemingly minor changes were made to the experimental setup (e.g., doubling or halving the spatial frequency), participants returned to chance levels of performance and had to learn the task under the new set of conditions from scratch (Fiorentini and Berardi 1980). This type of failure to generalize learning has been an extremely common finding in the perceptual and cognitive domains (Sagi 2011). There has thus been extreme interest in recent findings that several types of experience—including the focus of this review, action v
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