Action Real-Time Strategy Gaming Experience Related to Increased Attentional Resources: An Attentional Blink Study

Abstract

Action real-time strategy gaming (ARSG) is a cognitively demanding task which requires attention, sensorimotor skills, team cooperation, and strategy-making abilities. A recent study found that ARSG experts had superior visual selective attention (VSA) for detecting the location of a moving object that could appear in one of 24 different peripheral locations (Qiu et al., 2018), suggesting that ARSG experience is related to improvements in the spatial component of VSA. However, the influence of ARSG experience on the temporal component of VSA-the detection of an item among a sequence of items presented consecutively and quickly at a single location-still remains understudied. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, this study examined whether ARSG experts had superior temporal VSA performance compared to non-experts in an attentional blink (AB) task, which is typically used to examine temporal VSA. The results showed that the experts outperformed the non-experts in their detection rates of targets. Furthermore, compared to the non-experts, the experts had faster information processing as indicated by earlier P3 peak latencies in an AB period, more attentional resources distributed to targets as indicated by stronger P3 amplitudes, and a more flexible deployment of attentional resources. These findings suggest that experts were less prone to the AB effect. Thus, long-term ARSG experience is related to improvements in temporal VSA. The current findings support the benefit of video gaming experience on the development of VSA.

Action Real-Time Strategy Gaming Experience Related to Enhanced Capacity of Visual Working Memory

“…This study used the recruitment procedure established in previous research (Qiu et al, 2018 ; Gong et al, 2019b ; Gan et al, 2020 ). All the participants in the current study were college students of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) who responded to the recruitment flyers posted on campus or on the Internet forums hosted by the UESTC.…”

“…Based on the results, eight additional individuals were excluded prior to the experiment because they had moderate/severe depression or anxiety (i.e., SDS ≥ 63 or SAS ≥ 60; n = 5) and Internet gaming disorders ( n = 3). The participants also reported their: (1) gaming experience in the recent 2 years and expertise gaming ranking of League of Legends (LOL)—the ARSG game used in this study; (2) LOL ID, which was used to validate the participants’ self-reported gaming experience and expertise; and (3) gaming experience of other gaming genres in the recent 2 years to ensure that LOL was the major game genre for all the participants (Qiu et al, 2018 ; Gong et al, 2019b ; Gan et al, 2020 ). All the participants were right-handed and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no history of mental and neurological diseases.…”

“…This study defined the experts and the non-experts according to both time- and skill-based criteria established in previous studies (Qiu et al, 2018 ; Gong et al, 2019b ; Gan et al, 2020 ). The experts had at least 2 years of LOL gaming experience and were LOL masters based on their expertise gaming ranking (the top 7% of players)—an objective, commonly used tool for quantitating the relative gaming skill levels of LOL players.…”

“…A recent EEG study demonstrated that the EEG theta-band power (related to working memory load) was stronger during ARSG playing than during resting, music listening, and non-AVG gaming (i.e., life simulation gaming; Gong et al, 2019a ). Furthermore, ERP research showed that prolonged ARSG experience (e.g., League of Legends) was related to enhancement of visual attention, which was closely associated with individual differences in the VWM capacity (Qiu et al, 2018 ; Gan et al, 2020 ). Thus, ARSG offers a new perspective on cognitive and neural plasticity (Gong et al, 2015 , 2017 ; Kowalczyk et al, 2018 ; Gong et al, 2019a , b ).…”

“…Second, this study used ERP measures to test time-sensitive indicators to sub-processes underlying VWM (Luck, 2014 ), which may not be readily observable in behavioral research (Dale and Green, 2017a ; Dale et al, 2019 ). Third, the participants performed a change detection task that is indicative of VWM capacity rather than attention tasks (Qiu et al, 2018 ; Gan et al, 2020 ). Although VWM is closely related to several aspects of attention (Vogel et al, 2005 ; Astle and Scerif, 2011 ), visual attention and VWM share different key capacity-limited mechanisms (Howard et al, 2020 ).…”