Advantages Of Working Memory In Action Video Game Players

With the development of electronic games,there are a wealth of game types and carriers.It not only profoundly affects people’s daily life,but even some schools have opened related majors.Action video game(AVG)is one of the most popular game types.This type of game requires the player to respond quickly to the appearance of the target stimulus and has high requirements on the player’s cognitive load.A lot of evidence shows that action video game experience can promote players’ information processing ability,such as attention,reaction inhibition,mental rotation,etc.Studies have shown that action game players perform better than non-action game players in various visual-spatial working memory tasks.Still,some studies have not found that the brain activation of action video game players and non-action game players on spatial working memory and verbal working memory has a difference.This different result may be due to the other research paradigms used and how players respond to different stimuli.Therefore,to explore the different working memory characteristics of action game players,this study adopts the N-back experimental paradigm.Participants are required to make judgments on the other dimensional attributes of stimuli based on different instructions to avoid different effects on the participants due to various stimuli,and it is more ecologically valid.The stimuli for the two experiments were letters and irregular shapes.In the same experiment,the stimulus has two-dimensional attributes.The first experiment is the letter or the location of the letter,and the second experiment is the shape or the location of the shape.According to the participants’ game experience questionnaire,the study divided the participants into an action game player group and a non-action game player group.Experiment 1 selected 22 action game players and 18 non-action game players;Experiment 2 selected 20 action game players and 20 non-action game players.(1)Experiment 1 using location and letter working memory task combined with fNIRS,use 2(subject type:action game player;non-player)x 2(working memory type:location;letter)x 2(task difficulty:0-back;2-back)mixed experimental design.The results show that the location and letter working memory of action game players have an advantage over non-players.The specific performance is that action game players react faster than non-players when there is no significant difference in accuracy.And in the functional near-infrared results,it is found that the activation of action video game players in the frontal polar region and the dorsolateral prefrontal lobe is significantly less than that of non-players,indicating that action game players only need to pay less cognitive effort in the task to achieve the same level.(2)Experiment 2 using location and shape working memory task combined with fNIRS,use 2(subject type:action game player;non-player)× 2(working memory type:location;shape)× 2(task difficulty:0-back;2-back)mixed experimental design.The results show that the location and shape working memory of action game players is better than that of non-players,which is manifested in the fact that action game players react faster than non-players when there is no significant difference in accuracy.And in the functional near-infrared,it was found that the activation of non-action game players in the frontal polar region,orbitofrontal region,and dorsolateral prefrontal lobe was significantly greater than that of action game players.Based on the above results,the working memory of action game players is better than that of non-action game players and is not affected by the type of stimulation.Although there is no significant difference in accuracy,the reaction time is faster than that of non-action game players.Moreover,the activation of oxygenated hemoglobin in the frontal polar region,orbitofrontal region,and dorsolateral prefrontal region is lower than that of non-action game players.It shows that action video game players have higher cognitive abilities and only need less cortical activation to achieve the same or even better performance level than non-players.This research helps further to understand the cognitive processing ability of action game players.