PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

With the technological advance of recent years and widespread social acceptance for video games, numerous studies have confirmed the usefulness of digital games in psychological ex- periments. A frequent commonality in previous studies is the attention-based test framework, applying distraction in some way in order to in- terfere with participants’ cognitive capacities. Adopting this idea, we have developed the state- of-the-art first-person 3D video game ‘Wanted!’ to examine the interactions between attention, cognitive load, working memory and speech processing. In a free recall task with auditorily presented items and visual recall, we apply var- ying combinations of auditory (speech and non- speech) and visual distraction during memori- zation and recall. We present the results of a pi- lot study with 16 German native speakers play- ing the game, where auditory distraction during memorization and recall was found to impair working memory performance by over 11% each. Visual distraction only had significant im- pact during memorization, with a performance deterioration of 7%, yet a tendency of visual dis- traction during recall affecting working memory was still apparent. Finally, we make numerous suggestions for harvesting the full po- tential of our game prototype in the future.