Nick Conner

Senior Thesis
Dr. Mumford
April 7th 2015
March Experience Notes
Day 1- On the first day I partook in a series of five experiments
Experiment 1- A series of letters appear on the screen, and the
goal is to identify the white letter amongst all the other black letters
that appear, and on top of this you also have to identify whether or not
an X was present amongst that series of letters. This X appears either
3 or 6 positions behind the white letter or not at all. This experiment
was meant to measure the amount of attentional blink, which I
showed none of, proving me to be significantly higher than average in
that respect. The post-doc told who was running the experiment told
me VPGs consistently showed no attentional blink, because they cant
afford to have mental lapses.
Experiment 2- There is a letter in the middle of a circle and a
letter on the outside of that circle, the goal of the experiment is to
identify the letter on the outside of the circle which would either be a X
or a N, however there are three variables when identifying this letter.
The variables are the center letter, which will either be the same letter
as the outside letter, the opposite (so X or N) or a neutral letter such as
F. This experiment was meant to gauge my ability to filter out useless
information, and my performance was slower than average, exactly the
opposite of what I had expected.
Experiment 3- A circle comprised of circles and one square all
with gaps on one side them appear, and the object of the experiment
is to discern which side of the square has a gap on it. From time to time
a colorful circle would appear amongst the circles, also known as a
singleton meant to distract me from the square, however the
singletons had no affect on my reaction time, and once again the Post
doc said that was a prevalent outcome of gamers.
Experiment 4- This was an experiment Daphne used. I was asked
to track two or four objects that were highlighted for a second prior to
them reverting to back to the same color as all the other objects on the
screen, and then after five seconds of them moving in a random
motion, one would be highlighted and I would have to say whether or
not it was one of the dots that had been highlighted. I got every single
one right, 10% better than average for 2 dots, 25% better than
average for 4 dots. Videogame players showed similar results.

Experiment 5- 4, 8 or 12 color dots pop up and then disappear

and you have to do identify whether or not any colors changed when
they reappear, results inconclusive.
Day 2Started off with a lab meeting, watched two presentations presented
by undergrads, one that covered Attentional Blink, and something I
had been tested on the day prior. Second presentation on Boost
Effect or when forced to do a difficult task, one is more likely to
remember what they were doing/looking at while doing that task. After
that I partook in an experiment to test my ability to pick up on
repetitive patterns, something video game players who play first
person shooters consistently score well in, however since I havent
played a first person shooter in several months, my scores were
amongst the NVPG scores much to my disappointment. However, the
data sheet I was sent showed that VPGs showed a 14% increase in
accuracy in the identification of the repetitive patterns over the
NVPGs. I have all the data on my email. Shortly after I was done
playing with the data I atteneded a seminar called Attention Athletes
held by one of the Post-docs that worked in Dr. Pratts lab, which
covered how gamers who play for 10+ hours a week show
considerable increase in their ability to pay attention to minute details.
This seminar talked about attentional capacity and flanker effect,
showing that the level most people (NVPGs) reached their attentional
capacity significantly far below the threshold of the VPGs attentional
capacity. This was proven by the fact that VPGs were affected by the
flanker effect during a hard perceptual load task while NVPGs werent.
Gamers are able to subitize (Identify) two or more objects than NVPGs
and identify objects better in their peripherals through the Useful Field
of View test. Attentional blink in gamers in gamers is 20% more
accurate in lag 1-3 and consistently higher for VPGs but less than
20%. Gamers show reduced capture meaning that singletons
(distractors) slow their reaction time less than NVPGs. On average in
all psychological tests gamers are 11-13% faster regardless of
condition without cost to accuracy, which goes against the logic that as
RT gets faster accuracy declines.
Day 3Started off reading 7 articles ranging in topics from violent behavioral
tendencies in association with violent video games to articles covering
subjects such as gamers advantage in attentional blink, flanker
interference and visual search, sent the seven articles to myself for

further analysis upon school return to school. All seven articles were
recommended to me by a PhD student and colleague of Jays. The
article ranged from 10 to 4 pages in length. After this I partook in an
experiment that tested my ability to discern correlations between
colors, and ignore those correlations to make a correct decision. When I
finished I played with the data and saw, I, as a videogame player, held
a 7% advantage in the discerning and ignoring of these correlations
over NVPGs. After that I partook in an experiment that tested the
speed at which my eyes would travel to a new target. The
phenomenon that this experiment was testing was the Gap Effect
which measures your eyes reaction time to move to a new target when
a fixation point is either present or not in the middle of the screen. The
lab has found that active gamers do not show gap effect, meaning
whether or not a fixation point is present in the middle of the screen
does not affect the gamers eyes reaction time.
Day 4The day started by re-reading over two articles with Jay and going over
them with finer detail and talking about what occurred behind the
scene of the two experiments we were covering because he had
worked on both. After a couple hours of this I attended a several hour
seminar about attentional capacity of video game players with Jay and
one of his post-docs. This seminar covered the neuroscience side of
this observation, going into deep detail about how videogames
increase grey matter in the suborbital cortex. After this me, Jay and his
post-doc went back to the lab and deliberated about what we or I more
specifically learned. After this I attended a seminar with Jay about
Neuroscience behind the LGN and the role it held in the processing of
images at it very earliest phases.