Visual attention and action 3D video games
Year: 2010

We are living in the society, where the computers go along with us everywhere. We are using them not only for the work, but sometimes also for the entertainment. Our opportunities to play computer games are almost everywhere: at home, in the bus on our smartphones, or even on the lunch break at work. At this point, someone could think if the computer games have some influence on us. As we know, neurons that fire together, wire together. If we are doing the same task for the long time, we will improve in that task. So if we play some type of game for the long time, it must have some influence on us. In this work, we have focused on action 3D video games called FPS (First Person Shooter) They are really fast and the player needs to be quick if he wants to succeed. We wanted to know, if playing this type of games would somehow improve the player`s visual attention. The hypothesis is, that playing this type of games decrease reaction time needed for accomplishing some tasks which depends on visual attention. To verify this hypothesis, we run some standard psychological tests focused on visual attention on two groups of participants. In this pilot testing we got 10 players and 10 non players. All of them were males in the age between 23 26 years. They were recruited as volunteers which had answered on mass email. The criterion to player group was, if the participant likes to play FPS games like Unreal Tournament, Quake or Half Life deathmatch. There were used tests on following phenomena: attentional blink, stroop effect, dual task, visual search feature and conjunctive search and the last test was focused only on the reaction time. Attentional blink refers to the phenomena observed by rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) When presented with a sequence of visual stimuli in rapid succession at the same spatial location on a screen, a participant will often fail to detect a second salient target occurring in succession if it is presented between 200 500ms after the first one. Attentional blink was first described in 1992  For this task we were not using some classic test from Coglab or other which was already made, but we have made our own, inspired by research of Green and Bavelier in 2003. Our test could be divided into two parts. In the first part, there is classic attention blink test. There are 15 numbers (0 9) in rapid serial presentation shown in the red color on the black background and somewhere between them there is one presented in the white. The task is to detect the white one and remember it. One number is displayed 20 milliseconds and after it, there is 80 milliseconds blank screen. After this, there starts the second part without any pause. In this part, 7 random numbers are shown. The goal is to detect, if there is displayed "0" between them. This task includes two distinct attentional bottlenecks. First is the attentional blink, which is the difficulty of processing a second target that comes 200 500 ms after the onset of the first one. Second is the cost of switching tasks between the first and second target (from identification to detection)  Our results of this task have shown, that in the first part, players have done 18% less mistakes than non players. In the second part, players have done 13% less mistakes than non players. Stroop effect is focused on measuring reaction time, when participant want to do some task but some other automatized task is distracting him. Classical demonstration of this effect is the original founded by John Ridley Stroop. On the monitor, there is displayed name of a color, but its font has different color. The task is to identify the color in which is the text displayed. We are used to read the texts, so this operation is automatized and is distracting the participant from the naming task. Our results of have shown, that average reaction time of the players on congruent task was about 115 milliseconds lower than non players. In incongruent task was this difference 150 milliseconds. In the dual task test, participant is using only mouse. First task is to hold ball randomly moving on the screen in the square which is displayed around the cursor. In the second task, there are displayed numbers on one particular place on the screen, the task is to detect if there was number "0" presented. If so, participant musts click with mouse button. The participant musts divide his attention to both tasks at the time. Our results of this task have shown that in the first part players average error was much lower than non players. At the same time, the players have correctly detected 78% of shown zeros against non players 73% We were testing our participants also on visual search task. Both types of it were used. The feature search and conjunctive search. In both tests, there are presented specified number of distractors and one target object on the screen. In feature search test, the target object has some unique feature as color, size, shape, which differs him from the distractors. In this task, there are low reaction times because the target "pops up" between the distractors. The task is to decide as quickly as possible, if there is the target object on the screen or not. Our results did show some significantly difference only in one case, when only when the target object and 8 distractors were shown. But in this case, the average reaction time of the players was over 230 milliseconds lower (287ms against 515ms) In the conjunctive search, the target object share some feature with the distractors so it is hard to find it. The longest reaction time is when the target is not presented and participant is using serial searching for it. Biggest difference in the reaction times in our results was in two cases. First case was when the target object was not presented and there were 16 distractors shown. In this case the player's average reaction time was over 700 milliseconds lower (1150ms against 1880ms) The second case was, when the target object was presented and there were 64 distractors shown. In this case the player's average reaction time was over 400 milliseconds lower (1086 against 1520ms) The last test was purely focused on reaction time in visual perception. There was some random waiting time and after it, there was shown red text "STOP" on the black screen. Participant`s task was to press any key as fast as possible after detecting the stop sign. In our results, average reaction time of the players was 230 milliseconds against non players 260 milliseconds. In this time, there are more researches about influence of video games. Our research focused on visual attention and FPS games is indicating that the improvement in visual attention tasks could be made by playing this type of games. Sometimes lower reaction time would do the difference between life and death. If someone would need to improve himself visual attention, he could try to it this way and have some fun in doing so.