The Influence Of Action Video Game Experience On Multi-objective Visual Search Ability And Its Internal Mechanism

Moderate action video game experience helps to improve individuals’ cognitive competence.For example,action video game experience has a positive impact on the ability of visual search.However,a common feature of most current laboratory research on the impact of action video game experience on static target search capabilities is that it usually concentrate on single-target search tasks.Though this research paradigm could control some extraneous variables,it ignores the potential impacts of multiple target search’s errors.On the other hand,the internal mechanism of the impact of action video games on human cognitive ability is still controversial despite decades of intensive study.Therefore,using the multiple-target visual search paradigm,this study firstly explored whether the action video game experience affected the multi-objective visual search ability based on different decision criteria.Results demonstrate that :(1)when using exhaustive search strategy,the action video game experience reduces the subsequent search errors in multiple-target visual search.(2)For those experienced in video games,the use of exhaustive search strategy can reduce the subsequent search errors of multi-objective visual search task to a larger extent than the use of foraging search strategy.In addition,the foraging search strategy can significantly improve the performance in accuracy and response time while searching the first target in the multiple-target visual search task compared with the exhaustive search strategy.The debates about the intrinsic mechanism of how could action video game experience affect human cognitive ability mainly focus on the general learning hypothesis and the common demands hypothesis.Firstly,study 2 verified the general learning hypothesis by manipulating the probability of the double targets in experiment 2.In experiment 2,it was found that the experience of action video games and the probability of the occurrence of double targets had significant interaction with the subsequent search errors,which verified the general learning hypothesis.Experiment 3 explored the common demands hypothesis by comparing the different of multi-objective visual search ability among different types of game experience.In experiment 3,it was found that there were significant differences among the subjects at different levels,which verified the common demand hypothesis.In conclusion,combining the two-factor theory of intelligence,this study proposes that due to therepeatability and stimulation diversity of action video game,action video game experience enables players to improve their cognitive ability required by game tasks through special training,while the abilities such as probabilistic reasoning are improved at a higher level of hierarchical learning.