Abstract
We recently found that action videogame play enhances visuomotor control and the coupling between pursuit eye movements and visuomotor control. Here we examined whether action videogame play improves eye-hand coordination. We tested 13 action gamers and 13 gender-matched non-gamers with an oculo-manual control task which consisted of two conditions. In the eye-hand condition, the display (40°Hx30°V) presented pseudorandom movement of a cyan Gaussian target (σ=0.6°) whose horizontal position was perturbed by the sum of seven harmonically-unrelated sinusoids (0.1–2.19 Hz). Participants were instructed to smoothly track the target with their eyes while using their dominant hands to move a high-precision mouse to vertically align a red Gaussian cursor (8° below) with the cyan target. In the eye-alone condition, the display replayed the target and cursor positions recorded in the eye-hand condition and participants were instructed to only track the target with their eyes. Action gamers and non-gamers did not differ in their eye-tracking performance in the eye-alone condition. However, in the eye-hand condition, action gamers showed better tracking precision (measured as the RMS error), larger response amplitude (gain), and shorter response lag (phase) for both eye and hand tracking than did non-gamers. Consistent with our previous findings that concurrent hand tracking enhances pursuit eye movements, both groups made a smaller number of saccades in the eye-hand than in the eye-alone condition. While action gamers also showed a larger smooth pursuit gain (mean ± SE: 16.2% ± 3.6% larger), non-gamers showed a smaller smooth pursuit response delay (16.5% ± 7.4% smaller) in the eye-hand than in the eye-alone condition. Our findings provide the first empirical evidence on that action videogame play improves eye-hand coordination when tracking an unpredictable moving target.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016