Effects of Action Video Game Experience on Change Detection

Monitoring digital displays for changes will be an increasing part of a soldier's duties as the U.S. Army transforms to a networked system of systems; however, it is well established that humans often fail to detect such changes in contexts with competing demands on attention. Interventions that enhance visual attention might also enhance change detection, because focused attention has been identified as a requirement for change detection. Given current claims that habitual experience with action video games can increase attentional resources, we investigated whether such experience would lessen the incidence of change blindness in two change detection tasks. Although we replicated a previously demonstrated difference between players and nonplayers on the flanker-compatibility test (Green & Bavelier, 2003 Green, C. S. and Bavelier, D. 2003. Action video game modifies visual selective attention.. Nature, 423: 534–537. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), we failed to find evidence that habitual action video game players were superior to nonplayers when it came to change detection.