Video games boost visual attention but reduce impulse control

A person playing a first-person shooter video game like Halo or Unreal Tournament must make decisions quickly.

That fast-paced decision-making, it turns out, boosts the player's visual skills but comes at a cost, according to new research: reducing the person's ability to inhibit impulsive behavior. This reduction in what is called "proactive executive control" appears to be yet another way that violent video games can increase aggressive behavior.

"We believe that any game that requires the same type of rapid responding as in most first-person shooters may produce similar effects on proactive executive control, regardless of violent content," says Craig Anderson, Director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University.

"However, this is quite speculative," he warns. But what is not so speculative is the growing body of research that links violent video games -- and to a certain extent, total screen time -- to attention-related problems and, ultimately, to aggression.

People's ability to override aggressive impulses is dependent in large part on good executive control capacity, as will be presented at a symposium at the American Psychological Association (APA) annual meeting in Honolulu.

And social psychologists are looking how a variety of factors – including media exposure, anger, and alcohol -- affect that capability.

Two types of cognitive control processes play a large role: proactive and reactive. "Proactive cognitive control involves keeping information active in short-term memory for use in later judgments, a kind of task preparation," Anderson explains. "Reactive control is more of a just-in-time type of decision resolution."

Kirtland Peterson

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