Superior Visual Working Memory Of Action Video Gamers And Related Mechanism

Visual working memory (VWM) is fundamental to visual information acquisition and higher cognitive activity. Previous researches have shown the superior VWM of action video gamers (AVGs) in various way, but there are only limited research work that focused on related mechanism. This study uses change detection paradigm (memory array, retention and response array) to explain the advantage in VWM of AVGs from the views of both cognitive and neural basis.In experiment one, in order to confirm that AVGs have advantage in VWM, we use change detection task with color squares as stimuli, to compare the task performance of AVGs with non-video gamers (NVGs). Results show that both memory capacity K and performance (including accuracy and discrimination d’) of AVGs are higher than those of NVGs.In experiment two, we use another change detection task with color squares as stimuli to explore the underlying advantage of AVGs in cognitive mechanism. There are three tasks. In task one, we change the time length of memory array. In task two, we change the delay period between memory array and cue. In task three, we fix the delay period between memory array and cue, and change the delay period between cue and response array. The results show that the accuracy of AVGs is higher than that of NVGs in all three tasks; more importantly, the performance of AVGs is influenced by delay period in task two, indicating AVGs prevent the decay of information in memory better than NVGs.In experiment three, we use the same paradigm as in experiment one to explore the underlying the advantage of AVGs in neural mechanism. EEG is used to record brain oscillation (ERD/ERS) as a neural index to analyze the neural difference between two groups under visual woking memory task. Results show that there is load or related interactive effect of ERD/ERS in lower alpha, upper alpha and beta for NVGs, but not for AVGs, indicating that attention and task specific cortex activation decreases with increasing of memory load for NVGs, and under load 6 condition, task specific cortex activation is inhibited for NVGs. But for AVGs, attention and task specific cortex activation does not change significantly with increasing of memory load.Through the three experiments, we conclude that action video gamers have the advantage of visual working memory. And this advantage may be result from better prevention from decay and better capability to deal with high memory load task.