The Effects of Video Game Playing on Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities

75 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.Recent research has found that just ten hours of action video game playing can improve performance on a variety of visual and attentional abilities. These results counter the long supported notion that transfer of training is limited to tasks either identical or very similar to the trained task. The current study sought to replicate and extend these results. Participants were trained on one of three types of video game (an action game, strategy game, or puzzle game) and cognitive and perceptual abilities were tested before, during, and after training. It was expected for each game to improve a subset of abilities relevant to game play. Contrary to recent video game work, but consistent with the learning and training literature, little or no transfer of training was observed despite the current study featuring double the number of participants and double the number of training hours. These results suggest that findings of broad transfer from video games to perceptual and cognitive abilities are not robust and may be more specific than previously thought. Methodological differences that might have resulted in a failure to replicate previous video game work are discussed, but if these methodological differences are the cause they only underscore the specificity of previous training effects. However, the current results do not rule out that under the right conditions video game based training interventions might be an effective and enjoyable way to improve perceptual and cognitive abilities. Future directions are discussed.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD