Table_1_Action Real-Time Strategy Gaming Experience Related to Increased Attentional Resources: An Attentional Blink Study.DOCX

Action real-time strategy gaming (ARSG) is a cognitively demanding task which requires attention, sensorimotor skills, team cooperation, and strategy-making abilities. A recent study found that ARSG experts had superior visual selective attention (VSA) for detecting the location of a moving object that could appear in one of 24 different peripheral locations (Qiu et al., 2018), suggesting that ARSG experience is related to improvements in the spatial component of VSA. However, the influence of ARSG experience on the temporal component of VSA—the detection of an item among a sequence of items presented consecutively and quickly at a single location—still remains understudied. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, this study examined whether ARSG experts had superior temporal VSA performance compared to non-experts in an attentional blink (AB) task, which is typically used to examine temporal VSA. The results showed that the experts outperformed the non-experts in their detection rates of targets. Furthermore, compared to the non-experts, the experts had faster information processing as indicated by earlier P3 peak latencies in an AB period, more attentional resources distributed to targets as indicated by stronger P3 amplitudes, and a more flexible deployment of attentional resources. These findings suggest that experts were less prone to the AB effect. Thus, long-term ARSG experience is related to improvements in temporal VSA. The current findings support the benefit of video gaming experience on the development of VSA.

动作即时战略游戏（Action real-time strategy gaming, ARSG）是一项认知负荷极高的任务，需要个体具备注意力调控、感觉运动技能、团队协作能力与策略制定能力。近期一项研究发现，ARSG专家在视觉选择性注意（Visual Selective Attention, VSA）能力上表现更优——他们能够从24个不同外周位置中快速定位移动目标（Qiu et al., 2018），这表明ARSG经验与视觉选择性注意空间维度的提升存在关联。然而，ARSG经验对视觉选择性注意时间维度的影响——即对单个位置上连续快速呈现的序列项目中的目标探测能力——仍未得到充分研究。本研究采用行为学与电生理测量手段，在通常用于评估视觉选择性注意时间维度的注意瞬脱（Attentional Blink, AB）任务中，对比了ARSG专家与非专家群体的视觉选择性注意时间维度表现，以探究前者是否具备更优异的该维度能力。研究结果显示，专家群体的目标探测正确率显著优于非专家群体。进一步分析表明，相较于非专家，专家群体的信息处理速度更快，表现为注意瞬脱阶段的P3峰潜伏期更早；其分配给目标的注意资源更多，表现为更强的P3波幅；且注意资源的调配更为灵活。上述结果表明，专家群体更不易受注意瞬脱效应的影响。由此可见，长期的ARSG经验与视觉选择性注意时间维度的提升存在关联。本研究结果进一步佐证了电子游戏经验对视觉选择性注意发展的积极作用。