13TH NATIONAL MEETING OF THE APPE | UNIVERSITY OF MINHO | APRIL 2018
Conscious and unconscious attentional processing to conflict in videogame players Joana Dias1, Fábio Silva2, Samuel Silva3, Pedro Bem-Haja1, Carlos F. Silva1, Sandra C. Soares1,4,5 1. CINTESIS.UA, Departament of Education and Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal 2. Portuguese Catholic University, Institute of Health Sciences, Lisbon, Portugal 3. Department of Electronics, Telecommunication and Informatics (DETI)/Institute of Electronics and Informatics Engineering (IEETA), University of Aveiro, Portugal 4. William James Research Center (WJCR), Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada (ISPA), Lisbon, Portugal 5. Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Section of Psychology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
[email protected] |
[email protected]
Introduction • Given the myriad of information that constantly impinge our vision, our ability to select goal-relevant stimuli and filter out the distractor information, is crucial for an adaptive control system1. The executive control detects and deals with the interference from different sources of stimulation and plays a critical role in modulating the way the distractor stimuli are attended, based on previous experiences Conflict adaptation2 • Expertise in action videogame playing has been consistently associated with improvements in attentional skills3, for instance, lower reaction times4,5 and better suppression of irrelevant, potentially distracting information3,6,
• Unconscious processing of executive control may not require intention or voluntary control processing7
OUR AIM: Investigate attentional conscious and unconscious processing and conflict adaptation in videogame players, using an Eriksen Flanker Task and Chromatic Flicker Fusion (CFF) technique.
Method Participants: ▪ 31 videogame players (VGP; 27 males and 4 females) ▪ 29 non-videogame players (NVGPs; 15 males and 14 females)
Results (2/2) Ages between 18 and 27
Technique: ▪ Chromatic Flicker Fusion (CFF)8 was used to supress the flankers, presented on each side of the target, by alternating low contrast red and green arrows, at 30Hz, resulting in a perceived yellow color that fused with the background (masked stimuli) Example of the CFF technique:
Reaction time (RT) analysis: Visibility of the flankers (masked vs visible)
✓ Main effect of visibility of the flankers, F(1,58) ✓ Main effect of visibility of the flankers F(1,58) = 173.17, p
