The Effects of Peripheral and Central Distraction on the Spatial Attention of Video Game Players

Abstract

Previous research indicates that when judging the temporal order of peripherally cued stimuli, video game players’ (VGPs) attention is captured by the peripheral cue to a larger extent than non-video game players (NVGPs). However, it could also be argued that VGPs should be less distracted by peripheral cues as they have been shown to process and respond to visual information more quickly and accurately than NVGPs, therefore requiring less time between two stimuli to accurately judge the order of occurrence. The present research expands on this by using peripheral and central cues in a temporal order judgment task. Contrary to previous findings, VGPs had smaller PSS scores in both peripheral and central conditions when compared with NVGPs. These findings demonstrate that action VGPs are less sensitive to the effects of distracting information and are not as susceptible to attentional capture as previously suggested.


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