Doom'd to Switch: Superior Cognitive Fl Exibility in Players of Fi Rst Person Shooter Games Materials and Methods

Copyright It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content licence (like Creative Commons). UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (http://dare.uva.nl) The interest in the infl uence of videogame experience on our daily life is constantly growing. " First Person Shooter " (FPS) games require players to develop a fl exible mindset to rapidly react to fast moving visual and auditory stimuli, and to switch back and forth between different subtasks. This study investigated whether and to which degree experience with such videogames generalizes to other cognitive-control tasks. Video-game players (VGPs) and individuals with little to no videogame experience (NVGPs) performed on a task switching paradigm that provides a relatively well-established diagnostic measure of cognitive fl exibility. As predicted, VGPs showed smaller switching costs (i.e., greater cognitive fl exibility) than NVGPs. Our fi ndings support the idea that playing FPS games promotes cognitive fl exibility. to rapidly react to moving visual and sudden acoustic events, and to switch back and forth between different subtasks. The goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis that gaming is associated with a general and generalizable enhancement of cognitive fl ex-ibility. If so, more extensive experience with videogames should be associated with better performance on a task that requires mental fl exibility, such as task switching (Miyake et al., 2000; Monsell, 2003). Switching from one task to another requires the reconfi gura-tion of the cognitive task set, a process that has often been found to delay reaction time on the fi rst post-switch trial – the so-called task-switching costs (Allport et al., 1994). If playing FPS games would indeed be associated with higher fl exibility, VGPs should show smaller task-switching costs than NVGPs. PARTICIPANTS Table 1 presents the participant characteristics. Thirty-four young healthy adults served as participants, consisting of one group of 17 video-game players (VGPs) and 17 individuals with little to no videogame experience (NVGPs). Participants were recruited among students and through advertisements on internet forums mainly visited by VGPs. VGPs met the following criteria: play video games at least four times a week for a minimum period of 6 months. Subjects playing mainly web-based puzzle games were excluded. VGPs played on multiple platforms …