Spatial contextual cueing is not a limiting factor for expert performance in the domain of team sports or action video game playing

Abstract

We investigated in two experiments if handball and action video game players show improved implicit learning of repeated spatial configurations for efficient search guidance in comparison to a control group without sport or video game proficiency. To this end, we used both a sport-specific pseudo 3-D contextual cueing task and the original contextual cueing paradigm (Chun & Jiang, 1998). Contextual cueing was present in all groups. However, handball and action video game players did not differ in the strength of contextual cueing from the control group. Action video game players had shorter search times than controls in both experiments. In contrast, the handball players searched faster than controls in the sport-specific displays of Experiment 1 but not in the symbolic search task of Experiment 2. Thus, our findings provide no evidence that contextual cueing is a limiting factor for expert performance in the domain of team sports or action video game playing.