Visual Learning

描述(申请人提供)：玩电子游戏已经成为当今社会的一种常见活动；然而，人们对这种活动对我们感知能力的影响知之甚少。我们之前的工作表明，玩动作视频游戏会改变视觉注意力，比如在杂乱的环境中寻找目标或处理快速视觉信息流的能力。我们的广泛目标是进一步描述玩电子游戏对成人和儿童视觉技能的影响。对电子游戏使用的影响的研究具有广泛的影响，范围从公共政策到健康和成绩培训方面的问题。我们的目的不是研究休闲娱乐对社会的影响；相反，我们通过确定视频游戏对视力的影响来关注健康和表现培训，以及针对专门的视觉-运动任务的培训，例如由航空公司管制员执行的任务。 我们首先会问，玩游戏的影响是否概括到视觉注意的各个方面。这些研究将在成人和儿童中进行。然后，我们将测试玩电子游戏可能也会改变早期的视觉过程，如眼表上的底线。最后，我们将询问玩电子游戏是否也会改变视觉短期记忆或记住视觉信息的能力。玩视频游戏可能改变视觉处理的几个不同方面，这一可能性具有理论意义，因为关于知觉学习的文献证明了学习的一种很大的特殊性。因此，学习一项新任务通常会提高该任务的表现，但不能推广到类似的任务。相反，这项工作的目的是测试玩电子游戏不仅对玩电子游戏的表现有好处，而且对其他一系列视觉运动任务也有好处。因此，这项研究有望对视力缺陷患者的康复和/或在需要增强视觉表现的环境中工作的任何人员的培训具有实际意义。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Video game playing has become a common activity in today's society; however, little is known about the effects of this activity on our perceptual abilities. Our previous work indicates that playing action video games modifies visual attention, such as the ability to look for a target in a cluttered environment or to process a rapid stream of visual information. Our broad aim is to further characterize the effects of video game playing on visual skills in adults and children. The study of the impact of video game use has broad implications, ranging from public policy to issues in health and performance training. Our aim is not to study the impact of casual entertainment on the society; rather we focus on health and performance training by determining the impact of video games on vision and on training for specialized visuo-motor tasks such as those performed by airline controllers. We will first ask whether the impact of game playing generalizes to various aspects of visual attention. These studies will be carried in adults and children. We will then test the possibility that video game playing may also modify early visual processes such as the bottom line on the eye chart. Finally, we will ask whether video game playing may also alter visual short-term memory or the ability to hold visual information in mind. The possibility that video game playing modifies several different aspects of visual processing is of theoretical significance as the literature on perceptual learning documents a great specificity of learning. Hence, learning a new task typically benefits performance on that very task, but fails to generalize to similar tasks. In contrast, the aim of this work is to test the possibility that video game playing benefits not only performance on the played video game, but also on a wide range of other visuo-motor tasks. This research holds therefore the promise to be of practical significance for rehabilitation of patients with visual deficits and/or the training of any personnel who work in environments that call for enhanced visual performance.