Mind-Craft: Exploring the Effect of Digital Visual Experience on Changes to Orientation Sensitivity in Visual Contour Perception

Abstract

Visual perception depends fundamentally on statistical regularities in the environment to make sense of the world. One such regularity is the orientation anisotropy typical of natural scenes; most natural scenes contain slightly more canonical (horizontal and vertical) information than oblique information. This property is likely a primary cause of the oblique effect in which subjects experience greater perceptual fluency with horizontally and vertically oriented content than oblique. Recent changes in the visual environment, including the “carpentered” content in urban scenes and the framed, caricatured content in digital screen media presentations, may have altered the typical (natural) level of orientation anisotropy. The current work evaluated whether digital visual experience, or visual experience with framed digital content, has the potential to alter the magnitude of the oblique effect in visual perception. Experiment 1 successfully established a novel eye-tracking method capable of indexing the visual oblique effect quickly and reliably and demonstrated the oblique effect. Experiment 2 used this method and found that one session of exposure to a specific video game altered visual orientation perception. Taken together, these results indicate that exposure to the realistic, but caricatured scene statistics of digital screen media, can alter visual contour perception in one session.

Levels of orientation bias differ across digital content categories: Implications for visual perception

“…Urban digital gaming environments aligned closely with real-life urban scenes. These findings contradict prior speculation that digital content contains uniformly high anisotropy (Hipp et al, 2020). In fact, video games contain a sizable degree of variability in the amount of anisotropy in their digital content.…”

“…The orientation composition of the environment is reflected by a cortical orientation bias (Li et al, 2003;Mannion et al, 2010) and a behavioral bias (Annis & Frost, 1973;Hipp et al, 2020;Schweinhart et al, 2017). Indeed, one of the fundamental goals of this study was to examine the capacity of digital content to influence orientation sensitivity beyond that of the carpentered environment.…”

“…Note that the unequal distribution of neuron sensitivity early in the visual pathway appears to be in part counterbalanced; that is, the visual system also appears to employ a correction, the “horizontal effect” (Essock et al, 2003; Hansen & Essock, 2005; Schweinhart & Essock, 2013), in which more predominant orientations (horizontal, vertical) are suppressed by the visual system in proportion to their representation in complex scenes (Essock et al, 2009; Haun & Essock, 2010; Kim et al, 2010). A shift in the experienced proportion of canonical and oblique orientations may well affect this mechanism in particular, leading to potential effects in each of the arenas listed above.…”

“…Pixel-based games, M = 0.41, SE = 0.002, were significantly more anisotropic than nature images, t(920.37) = −71.91, p < .0001, η p 2 = 0.84, suburban images, t(542.47) = −34.19, p < .0001, η p 2 = 0.68, and urban images, t(488.31) = −12.33, p < .0001, η p 2 = 0.24 (see Figure 4). Minecraft, a three-dimensional game with a pixelated design (N = 316), was evaluated independently from other pixel-based games (see also Hipp et al, 2020)…”

The Cost of Saving: How Photos and Screenshots Impair Memory

“…Similar concerns accompanied the invention of the printing press due to its ability to store knowledge externally (Eisenstein, 1979). In recent years, the idea that our increasing reliance on technology may be negatively impacting our basic cognitive processes has steadily gained traction (e.g., Carr, 2008;Hari, 2022;Hipp et al, 2020;Pasquinelli, 2018;Seal, 2022;Wilmer et al, 2017).…”