Becoming a guitar hero: does it alter multisensory processing skills?

Three groups of novice gamers were trained for 10 hours using the music-genre game Rock Band©: one group played the game normally, another played using visual cues only, and a third simply listened to music. Pre- and post-test eye-tracking data was collected using a focused attention task in which participants quickly shifted their gaze toward a visual target; on some trials a to-be-ignored auditory tone was also presented. Past research has shown the tone to speed-up saccadic response time (SRT). We hypothesized that training on a music-genre video game would boost this intersensory facilitation effect, defined as the difference between SRTs on unimodal only trials minus SRTs on bimodal trials. There was an overall SRT decrease from pre- to post-test, but, more critically, the magnitude of the facilitation effect was not disproportionally enhanced in the full Rock Band© training group, relative to the controls. Future research avenues are considered.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (M.A.) in Psychology

Grantor dc:publisher

Laurentian University of Sudbury

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Berman, Gillian

• Music-genre video games
• training
• multisensory processing
• Music-genre video focused attention paradigm

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://laurentian.scholaris.ca/handle/10219/2264

OAI record oai:identifier

https://laurentian.scholaris.ca/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Alaurentian.scholaris.ca%3A10219%2F2264