Abstract
Visuomotor control skills (such as driving and flying an air craft) are essential for human survival. An important part of visuomotor learning is to carry out efficient eye movements to discover and utilize the most relevant visual information within complex visual arrays for the control of action (Gibson, 1966). We previously found that action video game play improves visuomotor control of a moving target. Here we examined whether the improvement is related to better pursuit eye movements and processing of dynamic visual motion information. We tested 21 male action gamers and 20 male non-gamers with a manual control task in which they used a joystick to keep a target moving pseudo-randomly along the horizontal axis according to a sum of sinusoidal function (0.1–2.19 Hz) centered on the display. The joystick control dynamics was acceleration control which required participants to primarily rely on target motion information to generate control responses. Action gamers had better control precision, higher response amplitude, and shorter response delay than did non-gamers. We then examined pursuit eye movements and dynamics visual motion processing of these participants using an oculomotor control task in which participants tracked a target that moved according to a step-ramp function with speed randomly sampled from 16°/s to 24°/s and direction randomly sampled from 0° to 360° in 2° increment (Liston & Stone, 2014). Action gamers did not differ from non-gamers in their eye tracking performance. However, action gamers' pursuit initiation, steady-state tracking, direction- and speed-tuning were significantly correlated with their superior control precision (Pearson's r: 0.46-0.60, p< 0.05) and shortened response delay (Pearson's r: 0.48-0.61, p< 0.05) in the manual control task. No such correlations were found in non-gamers. The improved visuomotor control in action gamers could be due to their improved connection of pursuit eye movements and dynamic visual processing with visuomotor control.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016