Video Games / Technology
April 24, 2008
Category: Research • Social • Video Games / Technology
Although not all games are equal, there's plenty of evidence that playing some violent video games can cause aggressive real-world behavior. Sites like addictinggames.com offer popular games whose sole point is to play the role of a hit-man or even to torture animals. Over 85 percent of video games include violence.
When these statistics are combined with the results of studies showing that aggressive attitudes and even actions can be increased after playing violent games for as little as 20 minutes, it's possible that we have a major problem on our hands.
Another potential problem of video game violence is widespread activation of a phenomenon that has been observed in many other domains: desensitization. Some desensitization is undoubtedly good: for example, a surgeon who exhibited the natural disgust and revulsion at seeing human entrails probably would have a hard time doing her job. Desensitization means that after seeing the gore of an operating room many times throughout her training process, she can overcome that natural revulsion to human innards and is prepared to do her job when it counts.
But other types of desensitization are not so good. Desensitization to racism allowed slavery to persist for centuries across much of the world. Desensitization to violence might mean that individuals are less likely to assist someone who's being attacked, or more likely to actively cooperate in a violent act. Aside from some reports of military uses for preparing troops for battle, there has been little study of whether playing violent video games desensitizes people to violence. So does the cartoon violence in games affect our reaction to real-world violence?
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:44 PM • Comments (31)
March 26, 2008
Category: Attention • Movement and exercise • Research • Video Games / Technology
[This article was originally published in January of 2007]
Many many studies have repeatedly shown the dangers of driving while using a cell phone. Yesterday, while discussing a new law in Britain imposing heavy penalties not only for driving using a handheld phone, but also while using phones with hands-free kits, commenter Jan claimed that talking to a passenger was less dangerous than talking on a phone. I replied that I hadn't seen a study demonstrating that talking with passengers was any different from talking on a phone, and Jan provided a link to one such study.
Greta and I have both read over the study, and while we can't say from these results that talking with a passenger is unequivocally safer than talking on a phone, the research is impressive. The study comes from David Strayer's laboratory, the same group that has conducted a number of studies demonstrating the danger of driving while talking on the phone.
The researchers, led by Frank Drews, recruited 48 pairs of licensed drivers to participate in a driving / talking task. Drivers were selected randomly, and were paired with people they were friends with outside of the study. Each pair was told to talk about about a "close call" -- a time when their life was threatened -- either on a cell phone or in person, while one of the people drove an eight-mile course on a driving simulator.
The conversation topic was the critical portion of the task, because previous studies comparing conversations with passengers versus on cell phones have found driving ability to be equally impaired. In these tasks, typically the passenger and driver had to complete a difficult task such as thinking of a word that starts with the last letter of the word their partner said, often under competitive circumstances: arguably this is not analogous to a real conversation in a car. The "close calls" topic was chosen because other studies had revealed that it leads to naturalistic conversations.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 8:49 AM • Comments (21)
June 19, 2007
Category: Video Games / Technology
[originally posted on April 20, 2006]
If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games?
While there are many correlational studies and even some experiments showing the relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior, there have been comparatively few neurological studies of violent games.
It's well established that playing violent games is associated with aggressive behavior, but it's difficult to determine whether violent games cause aggression. After all, people who are predisposed to aggressive behavior might seek out violent games. But a team led by René Weber did realize that a neurological study could provide another link between violent games and aggression.
Read on »
Posted by Aaron Couch at 9:18 AM • Comments (33)
June 7, 2007
Category: Memory • Perception • Research • Video Games / Technology
This is a guest post by Daniel Griffin, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
How well do you think you can navigate through these woods?
How about when your field of view is significantly reduced?
When external information such as sight is decreased, our ability to make our way to a goal while avoiding obstacles will understandably be impaired.But when we lose all visual information we can still make mental representations, or "mental maps" of our surroundings. Even blind individuals compare with those who can see in tasks such as recreating large scale representations of their surroundings. We depend on external cues for navigation, but the effectiveness of mental maps contributes what we consider "good" navigators. Do you ever get lost going to a restaurant that you have been to before? Much like driving a car with a GPS onboard, using a map -- mental or physical -- will help in arriving at a specific location faster than just looking out the windows. Francesca Fortenbaugh and colleagues explored the effectiveness of using mental maps in navigation by studying goal directed walking -- a procedure in which subjects are told to find their through a course to a certain target.
Read on »
Posted by Aaron Couch at 9:54 AM • Comments (8)
May 3, 2007
Category: Attention • Development / Aging • Perception • Research • Video Games / Technology
How many moving objects can you keep track of at once? Clicking on the image below will take you to Lana M. Trick's web site, where she has a nifty demo of a multi-object tracking task. You're asked to keep track one to four of the smiley-faces as they move randomly around the screen. Then when the faces stop moving, you click on the ones you were supposed to follow. Go ahead, give it a try!
You'll notice there are four levels of difficulty. Most adults can, with a little practice, track four out of ten randomly moving objects for ten seconds -- they fall apart when there are more than four objects to track or more than ten total objects (the "most difficult" trial features four objects to track and twelve total). But when do kids develop the ability to track multiple objects? Very young infants can track a single object moving by itself quite easily, but what about several objects moving among others?
Trick's research team developed a task that could be followed by kids as young as five. Previous studies of multiple-object tracking used colored shapes, which were uninteresting to young kids, who became distracted during the task. Trick's team told kids they'd be looking for sinister "spies" among normal, happy people (just like the demo you just tried). They found that five-year-olds understood the task, and reliably completed it when the faces weren't moving. Then they performed the same test on kids ranging in age from 5 to 19. The results are below.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:45 PM • Comments (10)
April 26, 2007
Category: Face perception • Language • Movement and exercise • Research • Social • Video Games / Technology
There is a considerable body of research showing that eye contact is a key component of social interaction. Not only are people more aroused when they are looked at directly, but if you consistently look at the person you speak to, you will have much more social influence over that person than you would if you averted your gaze.
The problem arises when you address a group of people. How do you pick who to engage visually? Most public speakers are encouraged to look around the room, alternating eye contact with individuals in the audience. But there's no way to look at everyone at once -- so some of your potential social influence will by necessity be lost.
Now, a team led by Jeremy Bailenson has figured out a way to get around that limitation. In a virtual reality environment, there is no need for the representations of other people to be consistent. Since each individual's virtual experience is generated separately, in a "room" full of people, each person could experience the phenomenon of everyone else looking at them. Everyone can be the center of attention, all at the same time!
In the figure, person A believes that both B and C are looking at her. But in C's virtual world, both A and B could be shown as looking at her instead.
Bailenson's team wanted to see if they could use this method to allow one person to increase his or her influence over more than one other person simultaneously, by programming her "avatar" -- the virtual representation of herself -- to be looking directly at each of the others.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:45 PM • Comments (21)
January 29, 2007
Category: Perception • Research • Video Games / Technology
Nearly all video games that offer a first-person perspective -- where the view on-screen simulates what a real person would see as she navigates through the virtual environment -- also include a virtual map to help in navigation. Even my favorite golf game has one. Such maps can be indispensable, but they also invite a question -- should the map rotate to align with the player's viewing angle, or should they remain at a constant orientation?
Aligning the map with the viewer's perspective makes it easier to find items, but constantly rotating the map might make it difficult for gamers to remember where those items are located when they move out of view -- when the object is needed, the map might be upside-down compared to when the object was first encountered.
Of course, maps aren't just useful for games -- more and more cars are equipped with GPS navigation systems, and hikers like myself like to use the old-fashioned paper type to help find campsites in the wilderness. Creating maps that are easy to compare to the first-person viewpoint, whether in a video game or an Air Force jet, can mean the difference between life and death.
Research on map orientation has found that mapreaders take locate items they see in a scene on the corresponding map at different rates. As you might expect, the more the map is rotated compared to the viewing angle of the scene, the longer an object takes to find, with upside-down maps taking the longest. But there is a secondary effect, which depends on the location of the object in the scene. Items directly in front of the viewer are located fastest, regardless of the orientation of the map. As the items move to the right/left and farther away, they take longer to find. But items that are farthest away, near the back of the scene, are found nearly as quickly as items directly in front of the viewer.
Take a look at this simple scene, made using the customizable video game Unreal Tournament:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:04 PM • Comments (2)
January 24, 2007
Category: Attention • Movement and exercise • Research • Video Games / Technology
Many many studies have repeatedly shown the dangers of driving while using a cell phone. Yesterday, while discussing a new law in Britain imposing heavy penalties not only for driving using a handheld phone, but also while using phones with hands-free kits, commenter Jan claimed that talking to a passenger was less dangerous than talking on a phone. I replied that I hadn't seen a study demonstrating that talking with passengers was any different from talking on a phone, and Jan provided a link to one such study.
Greta and I have both read over the study, and while we can't say from these results that talking with a passenger is unequivocally safer than talking on a phone, the research is impressive. The study comes from David Strayer's laboratory, the same group that has conducted a number of studies demonstrating the danger of driving while talking on the phone.
The researchers, led by Frank Drews, recruited 48 pairs of licensed drivers to participate in a driving / talking task. Drivers were selected randomly, and were paired with people they were friends with outside of the study. Each pair was told to talk about about a "close call" -- a time when their life was threatened -- either on a cell phone or in person, while one of the people drove an eight-mile course on a driving simulator.
The conversation topic was the critical portion of the task, because previous studies comparing conversations with passengers versus on cell phones have found driving ability to be equally impaired. In these tasks, typically the passenger and driver had to complete a difficult task such as thinking of a word that starts with the last letter of the word their partner said, often under competitive circumstances: arguably this is not analogous to a real conversation in a car. The "close calls" topic was chosen because other studies had revealed that it leads to naturalistic conversations.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 1:45 PM • Comments (5)
October 17, 2006
Category: Research • Social • Video Games / Technology
Click on the "Video Games / Technology" category over to the left and you'll see that we've covered many, many studies on the subject of video game violence, almost all of them demonstrating a link between playing violent games and real-world aggressive behavior. Nearly every time we do, we receive an influx of comments from gamers claiming that video games don't make them more aggressive. Quite the contrary, they argue, the games help them wind down, releasing pent-up anger harmlessly in a virtual world rather than causing real harm.
Offering counterexamples (such as the fact that games seem to make both me and my son Jim more aggressive, or even this Slashdot thread discussing "comfort games" players use to wind down after frustrating violent gaming sessions) doesn't seem to dissuade the die-hard defenders of violent games.
But recently, one of Greta's students located a study which attempts to answer the question of whether playing violent games can be an outlet for aggression in people who might otherwise behave aggressively in real life. A team led by Patrícia Arriaga recruited 87 unpaid volunteers to play violent and non-violent games while attached to heart rate and skin conductivity monitors.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:14 PM • Comments (22)
June 28, 2006
Category: Memory • Perception • Research • Video Games / Technology
When I play video games with my son Jim, I'm generally at a tremendous disadvantage. Most of the time, Jim has had more experience with the particular game we're playing, but even when we try a brand-new game, he just seems to get his bearings more quickly than I do. He doesn't have more experience with games or computers than me -- I played just as many games as he did when I was his age, and I've had an extra 25 years to hone my skills.
At age 39, I don't consider myself "old," and since I work with computers for 8 or more hours a day, I'm certainly not intimidated by the games or the interface. Could it be that younger people simply have more aptitude for the games? Many studies support the notion that younger people are better than older people at learning about spatial arrangement of their environment. Typically these studies compare college students and senior citizens, but they may also explain why Jim can find his way around the world of Metroid Prime quicker than his dad.
So as three-dimensional virtual environments become more prevalent, will older people be forever at a disadvantage? A team led by Marie Sjölinder recently conducted a study to learn if improving the interface could help older adults navigate virtual environments. They designed a 3-D virtual store, using realistic photos of the store shelves and an intuitive layout to replicate a real store as accurately as possible. They gave 12 older adults (average age 67) and 12 young adults (average age 26) a shopping list and monitored their progress as they moved through the store.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 11:52 AM • Comments (1)
May 30, 2006
Category: Memory • Research • Social • Video Games / Technology
A recent study about violence and sex in TV advertising got a fair amount of press. "Violence and sex don't sell," the headlines proclaimed. If such a claim is true, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom and the blusterings of ad agencies worldwide.
Advertisers have always used the idea that "sex sells" to generate interest in their products, and television networks have argued that they need to offer lots of violence and sex in their programming in order to attract viewers. But what if sex and violence don't really sell products? Doesn't that turn the whole notion of "sex sells" on its head?
We've taken a look at the study, by Brad Bushman and published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, and the answer to that question seems to be "sort of." Bushman studied 336 adults in central Iowa by showing them violent, sexy, or neutral TV programming (some of the programs included 24 and Cops [violent], Sex in the City and Will and Grace [sexy], and America's Funniest Animals and Trading Spaces [neutral]). Each program contained the same 12 commercials. The commercials were chosen from a selection of products that were relatively unfamiliar to the study group: "Senokot Natural Vegetable Laxative," "Nutra Nails," and so on.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 11:14 AM • Comments (11)
April 20, 2006
Category: Research • Video Games / Technology
If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games?
While there are many correlational studies and even some experiments showing the relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior, there have been comparatively few neurological studies of violent games.
It's well established that playing violent games is associated with aggressive behavior, but it's difficult to determine whether violent games cause aggression. After all, people who are predisposed to aggressive behavior might seek out violent games. But a team led by René Weber did realize that a neurological study could provide another link between violent games and aggression.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:50 PM • Comments (36) • TrackBacks (1)
March 7, 2006
Category: Research • Social • Video Games / Technology
The Prisoner's Dilemma is an ethical conundrum that's been used for years by psychologists, economists, and philosophers to explore human behavior. The basic scenario is this: two criminals have been captured and placed in separate cells. Neither prisoner is allowed to talk to the other, and the interrogators don't have enough evidence to prosecute either one. If prisoner A confesses and prisoner B doesn't, then prisoner A is released and prisoner B gets punished. If both confess, then both will get a lighter sentence. If neither confesses, then both will be released. For each prisoner, confessing guarantees a lighter sentence and opens the possibility of release, but also damns the other prisoner to certain punishment. If both prisoners trust each other, neither should confess, so ultimately the scenario is a measure of trust.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 10:58 AM • Comments (6)
March 1, 2006
Category: Development / Aging • Research • Social • Video Games / Technology
We've reported on a variety of different studies looking video games and various measures of aggression (you can check out our "Video Games / Technology" category, and our archives) and a fairly common reaction, often coming from an avid gamer, is that this simply isn't true about him. Now one of the serious complications of doing psychological research is that our intuitions about how, or even what, we are doing can be dramatically wrong--this is why psychologists started doing experiments some one hundred and twenty odd years ago. You cannot refute a careful experiment with a personal declaratory statement, but you can turn a personal insight into a new experimental question: What aspect of personality might lead to different reactions in the face of aggressive and violent situations?
Brian Meier, Michael Robinson and Benjamin Wilkowski thought the personality factor of agreeableness might be playing a role in how individuals react to aggression-related cues. You know who agreeable people are--they are the ones who warm and friendly, and seem to be able to diffuse tense situations by bringing up helpful ideas.
Read on »
Posted by Greta Munger at 8:56 AM • Comments (2) • TrackBacks (1)
February 1, 2006
Category: Music • Research • Social • Video Games / Technology
My son Jim's favorite game, World of Warcraft, only works on my computer, which usually resides in the kitchen. Inevitably, Jim's often playing his game while Greta and I are making dinner, and I have to say, the most annoying thing about the game isn't the violence or the sound effects -- it's the background music. We're constantly asking him to turn the volume down so we don't have to listen to that dull, repetitive music.
So don't gamers find music annoying, too? I know when I'm indulging in my one guilty pleasure -- computer golf -- the room must be absolutely silent. Music is the worst, because rather than hitting the ball according to the rhythm of the swing, I tend to lapse into the rhythm of the music, and instead of heading straight down the fairway on the Chateau Whistler course, my ball ends up careening off course into a field of neck-high nettles, or ricocheting off a pine tree and into a pristine mountain brook.
Indeed, in at least one instance (a racing game studied by M. Yamada in 2001), researchers found a negative correlation between certain types of music and performance on the game. But in both this case and my anecdotal example of playing video golf, we're talking about music that's not specifically designed to accompany a game.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:16 PM • Comments (12)
January 4, 2006
Category: Development / Aging • Research • Video Games / Technology
Much of the research on violent video games, like a vast proportion of all psychological research, has focused on college students. This shouldn't be surprising, since most college psychology departments require students to participate in experiments as a part of the Introduction to Psychology course. It's an easy way for researchers to find human participants, and a great way for students to learn how real research is done. Research results for college students often are equivalent to the population as a whole, and even when they aren't, college students can establish a baseline to compare to other groups.
But the group people are most concerned about when it comes to the effect of violent games is probably early adolescent boys, much younger than the typical college student. What if younger people respond differently to games? Unfortunately, there hasn't been much research on this age group, but Steven J. Kirsh has taken an innovate approach to predicting how the impact of violent games differs for younger adolescents. Kirsh has used more general research on aggression in adolescents to formulate several hypotheses on how violent games might fit in to those models.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 1:23 PM • Comments (0) • TrackBacks (1)
Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
