Allocation of Auditory Spatial Selective Attention in Action Video Game Players

Action video game play provides an important avenue for understanding the plasticity of attentional functions. Enhanced attentional control, such as the flexible allocation of spatial attention, has been documented as a result of action video game play mostly in the visual modality. Yet, the hypothesis of enhanced attentional control as a supramodal mechanism predicts similar enhancements when attending to stimuli in other modalities. Here, we investigate whether improved attentional control in action video game players (AVGPs) applies to an attention-demanding auditory task. AVGPs and non-video game players (NVGPs) listened to dichotic streams of tones and were required to focus on one ear or divide their attention between both ears while detecting rare targets among frequently presented standards. AVGPs outperformed NVGPs and showed less performance decline from focused to divided attention. Event-related potentials to targets revealed larger amplitudes in AVGPs compared to NVGPs of the longer latency N2 (270–320 ms) and P3b (390–440 ms) components, which suggests that late selection processes might enable effective target discrimination and enhanced decision-making in AVGPs. This work connects with the legacy of the pioneering research of Helen Neville on the cross-modal brain plasticity of auditory attention after visual deprivation.