Publication Date

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Committee Members

Herbert Colle (Committee Member), Joseph Houpt (Committee Member), Scott Watamaniuk (Advisor)

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Abstract

Previous research has found that Video Game Players, or VGPs, perform better on a variety of attention tasks (i.e. attentional blink, useful field of view, flanker compatibility, etc.) as compared to Non-Video Game Players, or NVGPs. We examined the extent of this previously observed VGP attentional advantage on a target identification task. Most VGP studies have examined the VGP advantage on tasks that primarily require detection but not identification. Identification is an important process beyond detection for encoding and later retrieving information. VGPs and NVGPs were tested on briefly flashed strings of digits subtending less than 10 degrees of visual angle. They were tasked with identifying a target among distractors. Some of the strings were visually crowded and others were spaced such that crowding was not present. Our results indicated that the previously observed VGP attentional advantages do not extend to an identification task. VGPs and NVGPs performed similarly on all conditions of number of digits and spacing. One previous study indicated that VGPs had a lower crowding threshold than NVGPs even at 0 degrees of visual angle. We did not find that this reduction in crowding threshold allowed for better performance on an identification task. Future research is needed to fully investigate whether VGPs are able to perform with better accuracy than NVGPs on identification or a similar task.

Page Count

60

Department or Program

Department of Psychology

Year Degree Awarded

2017

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

ORCID ID

0000-0002-8198-2792

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