As video-game playing has become a ubiquitous activity in today's society, it is worth considering its potential consequences on perceptual and motor skills. It is well known that exposing an organism to an altered visual environment often results in modification of the visual system of the organism. The field of perceptual learning provides many examples of training-induced increases in performance. But perceptual learning, when it occurs, tends to be specific to the trained task; that is, generalization to new tasks is rarely found. Here we show, by contrast, that action-video-game playing is capable of altering a range of visual skills. Four experiments establish changes in different aspects of visual attention in habitual video-game players as compared with non-video-game players. In a fifth experiment, non-players trained on an action video game show marked improvement from their pre-training abilities, thereby establishing the role of playing in this effect.

The authors investigated the effect of action gaming on the spatial distribution of attention. The authors used the flanker compatibility effect to separately assess center and peripheral attentional resources in gamers versus nongamers. Gamers exhibited an enhancement in attentional resources compared with nongamers, not only in the periphery but also in central vision. The authors then used a target localization task to unambiguously establish that gaming enhances the spatial distribution of visual attention over a wide field of view. Gamers were more accurate than nongamers at all eccentricities tested, and the advantage held even when a concurrent center task was added, ruling out a trade-off between central and peripheral attention. By establishing the causal role of gaming through training studies, the authors demonstrate that action gaming enhances visuospatial attention throughout the visual field. Keywords video games; attention; useful field of viewVisual acuity, or the ability to discriminate small changes in shape in central vision, is a key determinant of vision. Ask someone how good their vision is, and they will typically comment on their ability to read a sign, to recognize faces from afar, or to score 20/20 on an optometrist's eye chart. However, many of the visual tasks people complete on a day-to-day basis bear little relation to the ability to read the bottom line on an eye chart. For instance, driving does not require perfect acuity (many U.S. states require that one's vision be only 20/40 to receive a driver's license). Instead, the most common visual demands present while driving involve focusing attention on relevant stimuli, such as pedestrians, animals, and other cars, while ignoring the many irrelevant distractors that clutter the visual environment. The dichotomy between visual acuity and visual attention has been exemplified by many studies (Ball, Beard, Roenker, Miller, & Griggs, 1988;Ball & Owsley, 1991;Ball, Owsley, & Beard, 1990;Ball, Owsley, Sloane, Roenker, & Bruni, 1993;Intriligator & Cavanagh, 2001;Owsley, Ball, & Keeton, 1995;Sekuler & Ball, 1986), with the general finding being that simple tests of visual acuity and perimetry are poor predictors of performance on tasks that demand effective visuospatial attention.A number of paradigms have been developed with the goal of quantitatively measuring visual selective attention

SUMMARY Action video game play benefits performance in an array of sensory, perceptual and attentional tasks that go well beyond the specifics of game play [1-9]. That a training regimen may induce improvements in so many different skills is notable as the majority of studies on training-induced learning report improvements on the trained task but limited transfer to other, even closely related tasks [10, but see also 11-13]. Here we ask whether improved probabilistic inference may explain such broad transfer. Using a visual perceptual decision making task [14, 15], the present study shows for the first time that action video-game experience does indeed improve probabilistic inference. A neural model of this task [16] establishes how changing a single parameter, namely, the strength of the connections between the neural layer providing the momentary evidence and the layer integrating the evidence over time captures improvements in action-gamers behavior. These results were established in a visual, but also in a novel auditory task, indicating generalization across modalities. Thus, improved probabilistic inference provides a general mechanism for why action video game playing enhances performance in a wide variety of tasks. In addition, this mechanism may serve as a signature of training regimens that are likely to produce transfer of learning.

Perceptual learning refers to a long‐term change in the ability to extract perceptual information from the environment that arises via experience or practice. In this chapter, we first explore many examples of perceptual learning in relatively simple as well as in more complex tasks. Furthermore, we do so across sensory modalities (vision, audition, touch, taste, smell) with the goal of highlighting the commonalities seen in perceptual learning across systems that are typically considered separately. We then consider the most substantial issues in the domain, including the question of learning specificity (i.e., when do improvements on one task transfer to new unpracticed tasks?), the conditions under which learning occurs, the neural basis of perceptual learning, computational models of perceptual learning, and potential real‐world applications of perceptual learning. We conclude with future directions; although the field has clearly made tremendous progress over the past century or more, there remain critical gaps in our knowledge that preclude our ability to fully harness perceptual learning to make a real‐world impact.

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