The Use of Video Game Technology for Investigating Perceptual and Cognitive Awareness in Sports

This paper, presented at the DiGRA 2005 conference, proposes a framework for using video game technology to study and enhance the perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills underlying expertise in sport, with ice hockey as the focal domain. Its central argument is that expert athletes and skilled video game players both develop advanced perceptual and decision-making abilities through immersive practice, and that the interplay between knowledge types such as cue utilization, pattern recognition, visual search, and situational probability assignment is best understood within ecologically realistic contexts rather than isolated laboratory trials. The authors contend that expertise depends on the ability to shift between and hold multiple knowledge representations in memory during decision-making.

The proposed investigation is a planned experimental design rather than a completed study, so it reports no empirical results. Three groups would be compared: expert video game players who do not play hockey, expert hockey players who do not play video games, and non-players of both. Participants would complete baseline attentional tests measuring enumeration, spatial attention in the periphery, and the attentional blink, along with eye-tracking to compare the visual search strategies of experts and non-experts. The two non-gaming groups would then train for one week on an action video game and be retested, while the hockey group would also complete a pattern and cue recognition video test before and after training.

The authors' stated expectation is that short-term video game training will improve attentional performance and, more significantly, that perceptual learning will transfer to the unrelated domain of hockey. This is positioned against a substantial perceptual learning literature that finds training gains are typically task-specific and transfer poorly to new environments. The paper's broader aim is to inform game and learning design by clarifying how different knowledge types interact during skilled performance, with the outcome of the proposed experiment remaining untested at the time of publication.