Research into the perceptual, attentional, and cognitive benefits of playing video games has exploded over the past several decades. However, the methodologies in use today are becoming outdated, as both video games and the gamers themselves are constantly evolving. The purpose of this commentary is to highlight some of the ongoing changes that are occurring in the video game industry, as well as to discuss how these changes may affect research into the effects of gaming on perception, attention, and cognition going forward. The commentary focuses on two main areas: (1) the ways in which video games themselves have changed since the early 2000s, including the rise of various Bhybrid^genres, the emergence of distinct new genres, and the increasing push toward online/open-world games, and (2) how video game players have changed since the early 2000s, including shifts in demographics, the decreasing specialization of gamers, and the fact that gamers today now have a long gaming history. In all cases, we discuss possible changes in the methods used to study the impact of video games on cognitive performance that these shifts in the gaming landscape necessitate.

Global/local stimuli have been used to estimate global processing biases in individuals and groups, as well as in response to various manipulations. Throughout the literature, multiple different versions of global/local stimuli have been used, such as traditional hierarchical letters and numbers (i.e., Navon letters), abstract hierarchical shapes, and high- and low-spatial-frequency gratings and faces. However, currently it is unclear how reliable or stable performance is on these measures within individuals over time, and whether these seemingly different measures are tapping into the same underlying process. As such, the purpose of the present study was to examine the stability of individual performance on three distinct global/local measures over time and to examine the relationships among the measures. In two studies, we examined the reliability of the biases within, and the relationships among, standard Navon letters in a traditional interference task, hierarchical shapes in a forced choice task, and superimposed high- and low-pass spatial frequency faces in a forced choice task. In both studies, participants completed all three of the tasks, and then returned 7-10 days later to again complete the same tasks. The degree of global/local bias within an individual was found to be highly reliable in the hierarchical shape task and the spatial frequency face task, but less reliable in the traditional Navon letter task. Interestingly, in both studies we found that none of the three measures of global bias were related to each other. Therefore, while these measures do appear to be reliable over time, they may be tapping into distinct aspects of global/local processing.

A growing body of literature has investigated the effects of playing video games on brain function and behavior. One key takeaway from this literature has been that not all entertainment video games are created equal with respect to their effects on cognitive functioning. The majority of the research to date has contrasted the cognitive impact of playing first‐ or third‐person shooter games (together dubbed “action video games”) against the effects of playing other game types. Indeed, when the research began in the late 1990s, action video games placed a load upon the perceptual, attentional, and cognitive systems in a manner not seen in other video games. However, the video game industry has shifted dramatically over the intervening years. In particular, first‐ and third‐person shooter games are no longer unique in the extent to which they load upon cognitive abilities. Instead, a host of other game genres appear to place similar degrees of load upon these systems. This state of affairs calls for a paradigm shift in the way that the cognitive neuroscience field examines the impact of video game play on cognitive skills and their neural mediators—a shift that is only just now slowly occurring.

Over the past 15 years, numerous studies have demonstrated that action video game players outperform non-gamers on a variety of cognitive measures. However, few researchers have examined the potential beneficial effects of playing real-time strategy games or the effect of playing multiple game genres. As such, the purpose of the current study was to (a) replicate the existing findings that show cognitive differences between action gamers (AVGPs) and nongamers (NVGPs), (b) examine whether real-time strategy gamers (SVGPs) also differ from NVGPs on various cognitive tasks, and (c) examine how multi-genre video game players (BTweeners^) compare to both AVGPs and NVGPs. We created a large task battery that tapped into various aspects of cognition (i.e., reaction time, selective attention, memory, executive control, and fluid intelligence) in order to examine the tasks that differed between our three gamer groups and nongamers. Our results largely replicated the majority of the findings to date, such that AVGPs outperformed NVGPs on a wide variety of cognitive tasks, but the two groups do not differ in memory performance or fluid intelligence. We also demonstrated that SVGPs had numerically faster response times on several tasks as compared to the NVGPs. This pattern of results was similar to what was found with the AVGPs, although in the case of the SVGPs not all of the results reached the level of statistical significance. Lastly, we demonstrated that Tweeners perform similarly to genre-pure gamers in that their performance on several cognitive tasks was numerically better than for NVGPs, although the performance of the Tweeners was numerically lower than for both the AVGPs and the SVGPs. Overall, these findings have several implications for game studies, particularly with respect to how SVGPs and Tweeners are considered going forward.

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Higher education institutions are expected to account for their performance and this increasingly includes strengthening community relationships. However, assessment of Higher education institution (HEI)-Community partnerships is nascent. In this study we seek to discern the situation of these partnerships and examine accountability for performance in Canada, thereby advancing understanding about this international phenomenon. A search of Canadian HEIs was carried out to identify those with an explicit mandate relating to community relationships and an initial questionnaire was distributed to their offices. Results afford insights into the present state of HEI-Community partnerships in Canada. A second questionnaire, distributed to individuals within the HEIs as well as community partners, examined how best to assess the performance of HEI-Community partnerships. Indicators and measures associated with a three-fold framework (inputs, processes, outcomes) were validated, offering important and timely advancements to HEIs in the era of accountability and performance-based funding.

When the second of two targets (T2) is presented in close temporal proximity (within 200-500 ms) to the first (T1), the accuracy for reporting T2 is reduced relative to when the targets are separated by longer durations; this effect is known as the attentional blink (AB). Two recent studies have shown that individual differences in the magnitudes of the AB are stable both within a single testing session and over time. While one study found a large positive correlation between AB magnitudes when there was an attentional-set/task switch between T1 and T2 and when there was not, the other study found no relationship between the switch and no-switch paradigms. The present study was conducted to clarify this discrepancy by examining the reliability of, and relationships among, individual differences in AB performance on five different versions of the standard dual-target RSVP paradigm, three of which involved an attentional-set/task switch between T1 and T2, and two of which did not. Participants completed all five paradigms, and then returned 7-10 days later to again complete the same paradigms. The performance on all five versions was reliable both within and across testing sessions, demonstrating again that individual differences in AB performance are stable over time. In addition, all five AB versions were significantly intercorrelated, although the strengths of the relationships differed depending on the extent to which the T1 and T2 attentional sets/tasks overlapped. These findings provide evidence that multiple distinct dual-target RSVP tasks do share underlying variability, providing support for the use of different versions of the paradigm in the literature.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that regularly playing action video games (AVGPs) is associated with increased cognitive performance. Individuals who play role-playing video games (RPGs) have usually been excluded from these studies. This is because RPGs traditionally contained no action components and were thus not expected to influence cognitive performance. However, modern RPGs increasingly include numerous action-like components. We therefore examined whether current RPG players (RPGPs) perform similar to action video game players (AVGPs) or nonvideo game players (NVGPs) on two cognitive tasks. Self-identified AVGPs (N ϭ 76), NVGPs (N ϭ 77), and RPGPs (N ϭ 23) completed two online cognitive tasks: A useful field of view (UFOV) task and a multiple-object tracking task (MOT). The UFOV task measures the ability to deploy visuospatial attention over a large field of view while dividing one's attention between a central and a peripheral task. The MOT task measures the ability to use attentional control to dynamically refresh information in working memory. RPGPs performed similar to AVGPs and better than NVGPs on both tasks. However, patterns of covariation (e.g., gender and age) presented obstacles to interpretation in some cases. Our study is the first to demonstrate that RPGPs show similar cognitive performance to AVGPs. These findings suggest that regularly playing modern RPGs may enhance visuospatial abilities. However, because the current study was purely cross-sectional, intervention studies will be needed to assess causation. We discuss the implications of this finding, as well as considerations for how gamers are classified going forward. Public Policy Relevance StatementWe investigate whether individuals who play action video games that are mostly first-or third-person shooter games, as well as individuals who play action role-playing games, differ in their cognitive abilities as compared with nonvideo game players. We demonstrate that both action and role-playing gamers outperform nongamers on two attentionally demanding tasks and perform similarly to each other, suggesting that games other than those traditionally placed in the "action" genre may be beneficial for cognitive performance.