Dividing Attention Through Gaming

On the other hand, the main elements in GBL are Design Specification (Story, Consequence, Rules, and Interactivity) and Engagement (Emotional, Psychomotor and Intellectual). Lastly, the independent factors of educational effectiveness of a multiplayer e-gaming experience are usability, content, enjoyment and social interaction.

ORLY?

In 2003, an article in Nature caught people’s attention. It studied the potential consequences that video gaming may have on our perception and motor skills (Green & Bavelier, 2003). According to their paper, exposing an organism to an altered visual environment often results in modification of the visual system of the organism. One of the tests they used is an attentional study that measured distractor effect. Distractor effect is large when the task is easy and small when the task is hard. If a task is difficult, you will not be able to notice the distractors. Video-game players (VGPs) were able to detect these stimuli even when the target task was difficult, suggesting that spare attentional resources are able to “spill over”.

Compared to non-video-game players (NVGPs), VGPs had better task switching abilities, decreased attentional blink, and faster target processing. But what if it was the other way around? That people who had enhanced visual perception were good at the games and continued playing, thus making them VGPs? Well, the researchers controlled for that by training NVGPs on two video games, one group had to play Medal of Honor for an hour everyday for 10 consecutive days, and one group had to play Tetris. They found out that the group that played Medal of Honor had a significant increase in their visual perception.
So what did people think of this? In an article by Stoehr (2003), an avid gamer and assistant manager of Electronics Boutique was quoted, "I play games daily, I wear glasses and I'm still blind as a bat. It hasn't made any difference." Dr. John M. DeVaro, however, warned that "visual skills" is too broad to characterize improvement in visual perception. And that it can too easily be misunderstood.

"The Air Force found that trainees experienced with games were better at flight training," DeVaro said. "Fast, alternating eye movement is better for that." But he claims that it doesn't point at improved reading skills or accelerated learning ability.

Some video game critics worry that action-based games induce youth to act violently, and have ralied against some of the industry's products.

The study, however, did not include research on what specific dimensions of the game affect our visual perception. In a study by Zhang, Cao, Ding, and Wang (2008), they proposed a novel computable visual attention model (VAM) for video skimming algorithm. Since videos bear more motion than pictures do, they studied the attention values of the visual objects in videos to determine the video's attention curve. Their proposed model made the skimming results 15-25% shorter than previous models.

Why should we study the visual objects in videos? Well, it was found out that in order to shape the learning of our top-down attention-control skills, we need to develop our bottom-up processing skills. Bottom-up mechanisms prevent our visual system from exploring useless parts of the environment, and drive the eye to the most salient areas (Ognibene, Pezzulo, & Baldassarre, 2010).

In conclusion, different games are constructed differently. We need to study the elements in the game that stimulate our bottom-up mechanisms to pay attention to specific salient areas in the video--how we skim these videos. And most importantly, we should reach conclusions that are too simplified. It's not all black and white. Our visual system is complex. We can only figure out regularities that occur, and reach conclusions up to a certain point. Any other connections to other abilities should first be up for experimentation.

REFERENCES:

Green, G.S., & Bavelier, D. (2003). Action video game modifies visual selective attention. Nature, 423, 534-537.

John, S. (2003). Study: Video games help players improve their visual accuity skills; parents, experts still worry about what else children are learning. Savannah Morning News, 1A. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Ognibene, D., Pezzulo, G., & Baldassarre, G. (2010). "How can bottom-up information shape learning of top-down attention-control skills?". Development and Learning (ICDL), 2010 IEEE 9th International Conference on, Jan 1, 2010, p231-237, 7p.