Video game experience impacts the development of spatial memory

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Attention, Learning, Memory

Abstract

Technological advances have changed the way we test spatial memory, shifting from real-world environments to virtual environments. This shift provides experimental experiences mimicking everyday navigation, but with greater experimental control, and the potential to track a variety of responses in real-time. However, the growing popularity of virtual navigation paradigms sparks important questions about how pre-experimental familiarity in virtual worlds impacts individual differences in spatial memory performance in virtual tasks. We tested how individuals’ video game experience (VGE) impacted individuals’ ability to learn object locations in virtual environments.

Children (6-12 years, N=75) and adults (N=25) completed a virtual navigation task that required learning the locations of four objects in an arena. Unbeknownst to participants, object locations were either associated with a proximal landmark cue within the arena or distal environmental cues surrounding it. The proximal and distal conditions examined developmental trajectories of response and place learning strategies, respectively. Response learning is a rigid navigational strategy whereby objects are anchored to visible landmarks. Place learning requires integrating information about multiple landmarks to accurately encode locations. During test trials, participants were cued with an object and navigated to its remembered location. During feedback, the object location was revealed, and participants traversed from their selected location to the actual object location. Spatial memory indices for each condition were quantified by three behavioral measures: path efficiency, distance error, and angular error. For all measures, spatial memory precision increased with age. An interaction between condition and age for distance error (F(3,97) = 8.78, p < 0.001) and angular error (F(1,97) = 5.14, p < 0.001) revealed that children aged 9 years and above performed equivalently to adults in the proximal condition. However, even at 12 years of age, children did not perform at an adult level for goal locations associated with distal environmental cues.

Participants’ VGE was assessed through a questionnaire querying participants’ number of years of VGE, the average number of hours played per week, and the genre of games played. While we saw no effect of genre, participants with more VGE demonstrated better spatial memory on the proximal (β = 0.421, p = 0.000) and distal conditions (β = 0.381, p = 0.001). We also found significant interactions between VGE and age on spatial memory performance (proximal β = -0.351, p = 0.002; distal β = -0.285, p = 0.005). Separate child and adult models revealed that VGE did not predict adult spatial memory performance for either condition. Children’s spatial memory on the proximal condition revealed a significant interaction between VGE and age (β = -0.311, p = 0.002); by 10 years of age, VGE no longer predicted spatial memory. In contrast, memory for the distal condition showed a significant effect of VGE throughout the child age range (β = 0.297, p = 0.034). These findings indicate that the extent to which children play video games in everyday life positively impacts their spatial memory. However, the impact of VGE on spatial memory is coupled with dissociable developmental trajectories of response and place learning strategies.

Authors

• Hannah Elizabeth Roome, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Lajja Majmundar
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katherine R. Sherrill, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alison Preston, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author