god damn id love to meet the phd student who makes a lazy 20k tax-free salary knockin these studies out.

Probably only does it on weekends, works in the Uni bookstore tuesday -> thursday as the "real job"

Critique of Journal Article: “Action video game modifies visual selective attention”
Green and Bavelier (2003) suggest that, because more people are playing video-games more often, potential consequences of video-game playing should be considered. Interested in the ways that video-game playing may affect perceptual abilities in particular, Green and Bavelier conducted five studies comparing action video-game players (VGPs) to non-video-game players (NVGPs). Each of the first four experiments aimed to examine differences between VGPs and NVGPs on certain visual attention tasks, while the fifth experiment aimed to establish what role playing video-games has in these group differences. This essay will briefly examine each experiment and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the study.

The first two experiments, the flanker compatibility and enumeration tasks, assessed attentional capacity. The experimenters hypothesised that VGPs have an increased attentional capacity. The flanker task measures participants’ reaction time of recognition of a target stimulus presented with a compatible or incompatible distractor stimulus, and task difficulty can be manipulated by changing the number of extra stimuli. As the task becomes more difficult, fewer attentional resources are available to process the distractor, so the difference in reaction times between compatible and incompatible distractors disappears. Therefore, the difference in reaction times at different difficulties can be used as a measure of attentional capacity. Green and Bavelier acknowledge the flanker task as being an indirect method of assessing attentional capacity, leading them to also use the enumeration task: participants are required to report how many squares are briefly presented on a display. For fewer targets, participants use a quick automatic process called subitizing, while for more targets, they use slow serial counting. The number of items that can be subitized is an estimate of attentional capacity. In support of their first hypothesis, VGPs outperformed NVGPs on the flanker compatibility and enumeration tasks. Although the authors neglected to provide a correlation of these two measures with each other, they are each very effective measures of exogenous attentional capacity. A definite strength of this article is that the authors did not merely rely on the results of the first experiment, but supported it with evidence from the second.

In experiment three, Green and Bavelier hypothesised that action video-game playing increases the spatial distribution of attentional resources. This hypothesis was confirmed using a useful field of view task: participants indicate on which axis a target stimulus briefly appeared. Because the target was randomly presented on different axes at different eccentricities, participants’ localisation accuracy could be used as a measure of spatial attention. VGPs outperformed NVGPs at all eccentricities - an impressive result considering larger eccentricities were beyond the training range of VGPs.

Experiment four used an attentional blink task to measure attention over time. The attentional blink is the phenomena wherein a second target stimulus is difficult to detect when it appears between 200 and 500 milliseconds after a first target. The authors’ hypothesis that VGPs are better at processing items over time compared to NVGPs was confirmed: in VGPs, the effect of the attentional blink was less obvious. That is, Green and Bavelier reported that VGPs compared to NVGPs detected a greater proportion of secondary target stimuli at almost all time intervals after the primary target. However, certain weaknesses of this paradigm will be discussed later.

Possibly the greatest strength of this study into VGPs’ attentional skills is the inclusion of experiment five, which examines two possible confounds of the previous experiments, attempting to establish the precise role of video-game playing in these skills. First, are VGPs born with better attentional skills and play games as a result, or do their attentional skills get better as a result of game playing? Second, do VGPs have better visio-motor skills (used in experiment one to measure reaction time) allowing them more cognitive resources to attend to other tasks? To answer both questions, Green and Bavelier trained one group of participants at an action game for ten days, and trained another group at a non-action game with a visio-motor skill component for the same period. Both groups were pre- and post-tested on the enumeration, useful field of view, and attentional blink tasks. The action game group’s performance on the three tasks significantly increased while the non-action game group’s performance did not. This evidence offers strong support for the authors’ interpretation that action video-game playing can increase attentional capacity, spatial distribution processing, and temporal attention.

Although a strength of this study is the number of different methods used to measure attention, an important weakness in the attentional blink paradigm needs attention. In this task, participants were required simply to indicate whether or not they detected the second target stimuli. Green and Bavelier did not report using signal detection analysis on their data. Therefore, it is possible that the difference in measured attentional blink could merely be a representation of a difference in response bias: VGPs might be more liberal and be more willing to say they detected a second stimulus when they were not sure, while NVGPs could have been more conservative. Although baseline detection rates were recorded prior to the task, signal detection analysis would have proved a much more thorough and reliable tool to explore the data.

Another weakness of the study was how the different groups were defined. For experiments one to four, VGPs were operationalised as people who had played action video-games on at least four days per week for at least one hour a day for the previous six months. Green and Bavelier offer no theory to support why VGPs were defined in this way. Considering how quickly participants’ attention skills were enhanced through video-game training in experiment five, it seems plausible that there might be little difference in the sorts of attention skills tested in these experiments between someone who plays video-games on three days a week and someone who plays video-games on four days a week.

Although the researchers did find differences between VGPs and NVGPs, more representative larger differences might exist between better defined groups. For example, how easily these learned skills are reactivated and how quickly they extinguish might be important considerations in defining the amount of game play necessary to separate VGPs from NVGPs.

Traditionally, perceptual training has only been effective specifically to the learned task. Despite the few weaknesses and limitations of this study, Green and Bavelier have impressively shown that perceptual learning can be generalised to domains outside of which the learning occurred.
 
References
Green,C.S., & Bavelier, D. (2003). Action video game modifies visual selective attention.
Nature, 423, 534-537.