Influence of action video gaming on spatial representation in the haptic modality

DOI

Spatial representation in the haptic domain has been shown to be prone to systematic errors. When participants are asked to make two bars haptically parallel, their performance deviates from what would be veridically parallel. This is hypothesized to be caused by the bias of the egocentric reference frame. Stimulating the use of an allocentric reference frame has previously been shown to improve performance in haptic parallelity matching. The aim of the current study was to investigate the influence of action video game experience on parallelity performance. We hypothesized that participants who extensively play action video games with a so-called ‘bird’s-eye view’ are likely to process spatial information more allocentrically, resulting in better performance in haptic parallelity matching. This was tested in two groups of male participants, 10 participants with extensive action video gaming experience (AVGPs) and 10 participants without or hardly any action video gaming experience (NAVGPs). Additionally, the effect of visual–haptic practice on haptic parallelity performance was tested. In the haptic blocks, blindfolded participants had to feel the orientation of a reference bar with their non-dominant hand and had to match this orientation on a test bar with their dominant hand. In subsequent visual–haptic blocks, they had full view of the set-up and visually paralleled both bars. As hypothesized, AVGPs performed significantly better in haptic blocks than NAVGPs. Visual–haptic practice resulted in significantly better performance in subsequent haptic blocks in both groups. These results suggest that playing action video games might enhance haptic spatial representation, although a causative relationship still needs to be established.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/D0EUPE
Related Identifier IsCitedBy https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-020-05931-7
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/D0EUPE
Provenance
Creator Van Mier, Hanneke I. ORCID logo; Jiao, Hui ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Van Mier, Hanneke I.; faculty data manager FPN
Publication Year 2021
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact Van Mier, Hanneke I. (Maastricht University); faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type experimental data; Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav
Size 10046
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences