Addressing the Association Between Action Video Game Playing Experience and Visual Search in Naturalistic Multisensory Scenes

Abstract

Prior studies investigating the effects of routine action video game playing have demonstrated improvements in a variety of cognitive processes, including improvements in attentional tasks. However, there is little evidence indicating that the cognitive benefits of playing action video games generalize from simplified unisensory stimuli to naturalistic multisensory scenes - a fundamental characteristic of natural, everyday life environments. In particular, it is unknown whether video game experience has an impact on cross-modal congruence effects when searching through such multisensory scenes. The present pre-registered compared the performance of action video game players (AVGPs) with non-video game players (NVGPs) on a visual search task for objects embedded in video clips of realistic scenes. We run two identical online experiments with gender-balanced samples, for a total N=130. Overall, the data replicated previous findings reporting search benefits when visual targets were accompanied by semantically congruent auditory events, compared to neutral or incongruent ones. However, according to the results, AVGPs did not consistently outperform NVGPs in the search task overall, nor they exploit multisensory cues more efficiently than NVGPs. Exploratory analyses with self-reported gender as a variable revealed a potential difference in response strategy between experienced male and female AVGPs when dealing with cross-modal cues. These findings suggest that the generalization of the advantage of AVG experience to realistic, cross-modal situations should be done with caution, and considering gender-related aspects.