Is experience in multi-genre video game playing accompanied by impulsivity?

Abstract

Developing impulsivity has been one of the main concerns thought to arise from the increasing popularity of video gaming. Most of the relevant literature has treated gamers as pure-genre players (i.e. those who play only a specific genre of game). However, it is not clear how impulsivity is associated with different genres of games in multi-genre gamers, given that there is increasing diversity in the games played by individuals. In this study, we compared 33 gamers to 23 non-gamers in a go/no-go task: the Continuous Performance Test (CPT). To evaluate whether or not impulsivity occurs as a trade-off between speed and accuracy, we emphasised fast performance to all participants. Then, to examine the ability to predict impulsivity from game genre-hours, we fitted separate multiple regression models to several dependent variables. As an additional measure, we also compared groups in an antisaccade task. In the CPT, gamers showed a trend towards significantly faster reaction time (RT), accompanied by higher false alarm rate (FAR) and more risk-taking response bias (β), suggesting impulsive responses. Interestingly, there was a significant negative correlation between RT and FAR across all participants, suggesting an overall speed-accuracy trade-off strategy, perhaps driven by the emphasis on speed during task instruction. Moreover, time spent on role playing games (RPG) and real-time strategy (RTS) games better predicted FAR and β than did time spent on action and puzzle games. In the antisaccade task; however, gamers showed a shorter antisaccade latency but a comparable error rate in comparison with non-gamers. There was no specific game genre which could predict performance in the antisaccade task. Altogether, there was no evidence of oculomotor impulsivity in gamers; however, the CPT results suggested the presence of impulsive responses in gamers, which might be the result of a speed-accuracy trade-off. Furthermore, there was a difference in game genres, with time spent on RPG and RTS games being accompanied by greater probability of impulsive responses. Training studies are required to investigate the causality of different video game genres on the development of impulsivity.

A Multimodal Analysis Combining Behavioral Experiments and Survey-Based Methods to Assess the Cognitive Effect of Video Game Playing: Good or Evil?

“…While antisaccade error rates were different between VGPs and NGVPs, neither pro-nor antisaccade RTs showed any significant difference between the two groups, although there was a marginal trend toward faster RT for the VGP group. Therefore, our result of RT analysis does not agree with those from the literature that reported significantly faster RTs of VGPs [37,47]. It should be noted, however, that such discrepancy could have been simply caused by differences in task difficulty or data processing method; compared to our pro-and antisaccade tasks that followed rather standardized protocols in neuroscience studies [50], both pro-and antisaccade experiments used by Mack and Ilg [37] were substantially more difficult, including mixed pro-and antisaccade conditions within the same block with four targets (instead of two in our study) and additional double-step requirement.…”

“…Our result on the antisaccade error rate agrees well with the results of a group of studies on the impulse control characteristics of VGPs [46,65,66], which supported the idea that VGPs suffer an increased level of impulsivity [37,46,47]. This is also confirmed by neuroimaging studies demonstrating that video game playing can adversely affect regions in the frontal lobe that are involved in impulse control [6,7] and other mental functions related to IGD [67][68][69].…”

“…Since erroneous antisaccades are likely to be express saccades and therefore are likely to have shorter RTs, this extra data processing may have an effect of altering the statistics of RT. The study by Azizi et al [47] includes only a small number of antisaccade trials (60 trials for each participant), which makes it difficult to be compared with our result.…”

“…However, the lower BIS score in our study is different from other studies that show a higher BIS score [78] and a similar BIS score [21,82,83] compared to the standard BIS score. Further investigation would be needed in order to understand this conflict, but it is likely that such discrepancies were caused by the difference between selection criteria; while VGPs in BE-based studies [34,37,47], including ours, were classified based on video game usage time, VGPs in the SRA-based studies [21,78,82,83] were classified through questionnaires used to identify gaming-related mental disorders, indicating that more severe criteria were applied for SRA-based studies.…”

“…Notwithstanding this clear contradiction, only a few studies (for example, Littel et al [46], Azizi et al [47]) have attempted to reconcile this conflict between SRA-and BE-based studies. Interestingly, these conflicting results from two methods seem to be cited rather selectively by follow-up or related studies in order to support their own argument, and therefore are likely to contribute to the serious babelization in this field.…”