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 However, the methodologies in use today are becoming outdated, as both video games and the gamers themselves are constantly evolving.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.

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.

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.

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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