Game thinking from Adam Clare

Tag: attention

Video Gamers Process Visual Information Faster

In the May issue of the Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics journal, a paper was published which concludes that video gamers are better at dealing with visual information than none-gamers. This comes as a surprise to nobody but it’s good to see research baking up what everyone already thinks. The full title is “Action video game playing is associated with improved visual sensitivity, but not alterations in visual sensory memory” (there is a paywall).

The interesting thing to note though is not that players are better at all aspects of visual cognition. What they are better at is absorption and filtering. This article sums up the research:

When playing a game, especially one of the “first-person shooters,” a gamer makes “probabilistic inferences” about what he’s seeing — good guy or bad guy, moving left or moving right — as rapidly as he can.

Appelbaum said that with time and experience, the gamer apparently gets better at doing this. “They need less information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster.”

Via /.

Half of American Adults are on Their Mobiles While Watching TV

There are some great shows on TV like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad which I find requires my undivided attention. Other shows, in fact most shows I enjoy, don’t get me nearly as absorbed nor do they all need my constant attention (I’m looking at you Modern Family). To be clear: my opinion on TV shows doesn’t stem from whether or not they take all my focus.

Turns out, most Americans don’t give shows all their attention either: 52% are on their mobiles while ‘watching’ TV. Pew Internet Research did the research and found among other things that only 38% of people tune out commercials by checking their mobile. I’m amazed people watch them in the first place.

Taken together, that works out to 52% of all adult cell owners who are “connected viewers”—meaning they took part in at least one of these activities in the 30 days preceding our survey.2 Young adults in particular stand out for their embrace of multi-screen viewing experiences, as some 81% of mobile owners ages 18-24 reported using their cell phones during televised programming in the preceding 30 days.

I know this isn’t directly game related; however, it is interesting seeing that people seem to move towards interactive experiences while getting a passive one.

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