by According to Hauck, C., Lien, MC. 2022, Action video game players were less susceptible to being captured by salient distractors and, if so, whether that relationship was due to greater visual working memory capacity. It is well established that attention can be captured by salient distractors.
According to several studies, action video game players are less prone than non-players to being distracted by unrelated stimuli. According to other research, those with better visual working memory are less likely to be distracted by unrelated stimuli than people with poorer visual working memory.
After completing a questionnaire reporting on their video game-playing experience, participants performed a colour change detection task to test their visual working memory. After that, participants completed an attention-grabbing activity in which they had to decide how a bar within a shape singleton should be oriented while attempting to ignore a colour singleton distractor that appeared in half of the trials.
According to the findings, those who play action video games don’t produce any less of a capture effect than those who don’t. Nevertheless, independent of their prior video game-playing experience, people with strong visual working memory capacity exhibited less of a capture effect than people with low visual working memory capacity.
These findings show that individual differences in visual working memory capacity may better explain the ability to avoid capture by irrelevant distractions than by action video game experience.
