Gender Differences In Visual Attention
Introduction
Overview
Since the development of the technology towards video games for the past few years, there is an increase in the number of people’s involvement especially among women. Today, the video game has been grown and upgraded into a better more complex and interactive. Since there possibility of different approach conducted by researchers, there is shown that women developed better performance in spatial task compared to men. Therefore, this research will examine the theory of findings that showed the results of gender difference specifically in visual selective attention is preferable in woman on the engagement of video game. There is some research discovered that video game playing could improve an individual’s performance of visual skills. In regard to the theory, this study proposed distinct aspects of visual attention in engaging video game among different gender by using video game questionnaire.
Background Study
In this modernization era, video games have been played by a various range of age worldwide. Indeed, it had developed into a variety of activities such as the play of the online game as alone or accompanied and some more. In fact, men are a synonym to displayed as a gamer rather than women (Shaw, 2012). Today, society commonly parents are concerned about their children who is influenced into the “game culture”. Despite of knowing the fact that, there might be some good aspect of video game that could lead to the skills and interest of their children in learning environment. Parents mostly find that it is difficult to understand their children’s interest in playing video game. In fact, society believed that engaging with video game or anything involving gadget like social media could influence their children’s school performance. For past few years, men are dominant in gaming skills, however, as the development of technology in gaming becomes more interactive and accessible everywhere, women are slowly become greater in participating this culture. Furthermore, social media also play an important role to
Adolescence nowadays is introduced to a greater interactive video game which results in increment in statistics people engaging with video games. A lot of inventor and developer of games tend to create a better approach for users to engage with. According to Green and Bavelier (2003), they found out that video game can provide a variety of potential of improvements in regard to visual attention abilities. Besides, there are studies that examined a higher-level difference such as attentional control (Chisholm, Hickey, Theeuwes, & Kingstone, 2010). Since there is research proving that video game could benefit the youngsters, a few studies are focusing on finding the beneficial aspect of cognitive in term of academic performance among college students. In spite of that, the results obtained might be influenced by their background profile or environmental factor. For instance, a male student who likes to play video game might be having difficulty of concentrating in class as he was a game addictor. Thus, the aim of this study is to analyze the correlation between the score obtained as a dependent variable and to discuss the possible pattern that confirming the gender has a difference in term of attention. By taking an aspect of gender into account in this study will open a new scientific study in the future for a better approach.
Problem Statement
Since more recent research has studied the possible impact on cognition generally, this study wanted to concentrate more on visual selective attentional processing among a different gender. This is due to where playing video games could result by interpreting different view to attain the attentional processing from different gender. Video games are mainly claimed to demand in visuospatial of attentional processing which significantly referred dominantly to the man. There are studies from the various cross-sectional area found the significance group distinct in playing video games. Moreover, several training studies have discovered that there is an improvement in term of attentional performance after engaging with a video game. While some studies can be clearly to understood in term of visual spatial ability, but the possibility of difference experiences in women playing the video game might be point out and should be considered to the result of women can perform better in playing a video game than men.
Objectives and Research Questions and/or Hypotheses
Objective
The main objective of this study is to identify the visual selective attention from a difference gender perspective in engaging with action video game among undergraduates’ students from different courses in UNIMAS, Kota Samarahan, Sarawak.
This study suggests several research objectives be attained as follows:
- To investigate the level of score from playing action video games among students.
- To investigate the player’s skill in term of visual selective attention in engaging the video game and gender as the potentially independent variables among UNIMAS students.
Research Questions
This study will be conducted to identify the visual selective attention from a different gender perspective in engaging with a video game based on the questionnaire that will determine the gender variables which could become a potential predictor of possession of visual selective attention. The following are the questionnaire of this study:
- Is there any relationship between gender and visual selective attention through playing video game in term of score?
- Does gender effects the performance in engaging the video game?
Research Hypothesis
- There is no significant relationship between the visual selective attention and gender’s score from playing video game.
- There is a significant relationship between the visual selective attention and gender’s score from playing a video game.
- There is no significant relationship between gender and visual selective attention that in favour of females.
- There is a significant relationship between gender and visual selective attention that in favour of females.
Conceptual Operational Definitions of Key Terms/concepts
The followings were the key terms used in this: Video games have now become one of the most popular trend activities as in worldwide. (Prot et al. , 2014). There were some minority of excessive players that suffered from the consequences involving the impairment of several parts of cognitive skills. Regardless of that, there is also been evidence of engaging with video games could improve in term of different cognitive skills. Hence, the recent study had reviewed the empirical studies of the beneficial impact of video games on individuals’ cognitive skills. So far, there are numerous paper that empirically investigating the specific skills such as task shifting, attentional control and in term of perception. Several studies are emphasized the impact of video gaming on visual selective attention that differs upon gender.
Selective attention is reviewed as a central component of cognitive functioning in our brain. While several studies have demonstrated gender differences in cognitive tasks, there has been little research conducted on gender differences specifically in selective attention. According to Galotti, selective attention involved process of mental focusing towards one or more tasks (2008). It also stated that a person that engage with selective attention is utilizing and control their mental processing without aware of their surrounding (Goldstein,2011). Meanwhile, visual selective attention is referred to individual’s priority to have high focusing skills and ability to concentrate on engaging visual task (Chelazzi et al, 2013). Thus, by considering that younger adults nowadays have been seen engaging with video game, the possible contribution of gender differences specifically in term of visual selective attention should be explored.
Significance and Scope of Study
As this study was a replicate research, it is important to consider the potential of effect on visual selective attention towards gender perspectives. As the scope about visual attention is being studied for the past few years, yet it still unclear of approaching to do in a video game. It is well known that men are being dominant in the involvement of video game compared to women. However, more studies have come out to differentiate the change in cognitive skills between gender for the past century using different instruments. The field of the video game has been discussed generally in term of cognitive effect for recent years but not yet discovered in depth in term of cognitive skills especially in visual selective attention among gender. It is plausible to consider the potential of consequences from different gender performance on visual attention skills. Furthermore, this kind of study involving video game is commonly explained in term of engineering and social perspective instead of the cognitive approach. As it been discussed mostly in the general aspect of cognitive function, this study tends to focus more descriptively on visual attention.
Review Related Literature
Based on past research, the person who played the action video games tends to improve in term of temporal and spatial ability regarding the better performance in visual selective attention (Bediou et al, 2017). Generally, most of sex difference related to cognitive ability have been studied in the past few decades. It has found that men possessed more on visuospatial task while women perform better in the verbal task (Herlitz and Lovén, 2009). It is common issues in cognitive skills regarding differences in gender (Overman, 2004).
Study has shown that playing video game has beneficial effects in improvement of attentional abilities. (Bavelier,Achtman, Mani, Föcker, 2012). Lots of studies have focused on attention, but only a few have focused on gender differences in visual selective attention through the video game. Some recent studies have using reaction time as an indicator which found that men and women differ in selective attention shifting (Riley, 2016). Regarding the topic, research done by Mezzacappa has found that both male and female have significant difference in term their attentional focus (2004). Some previous research has used mostly spatial cueing to compare the performance between men and women (Golla et al, 2004). This study examined the response of individuals towards the targets in the cued setting. In other words, it relates to the cueing effect which compared the quicker and accurate response from the subjects. Based on the result, women showed larger cueing effect than the men, regardless of whether the cue involved as gaze or an arrow (Bayliss et al. , 2005).
There also research found regarding sex differences in visual selective attention using the “flanker” pattern. A study conducted by Stoet (2011) has used a flanker task to identify the sex difference in visual attention. As a result, from the finding shown that female and male performance differ upon The flanker task is based on the reaction time by which the subjects were instructed to press down a key if the green circle appeared and stop pressing the key when there is a red circle. From the study, they found that women need more exercise trials compared to men. A few years later Stoet had conducted another study that resulted in a larger Simon effect in women which impacted by task-irrelevant spatial information compared to men (2017).
Furthermore, studies also have shown that the temporal and parietal regions of the brain are important for visual–spatial sensory detection due to their role in encoding stimulus from the surrounding (Derrfuss et al. , 2005). This followed by study that shown the inferior parietal lobe is a crucial region for selective spatial attention (Brazdil et al. , 2007). Besides, the fMRI findings conducted by Corbetta and Shulman (2002) propose that visual attention is influenced by two partially neural systems. As these studies focused on neural studies, it has found that men have powerful parietal activation meanwhile women have stronger frontal activation during tasks involving their working memory, mental rotation and cognitive shifting (Christakou et al. , 2009). Thus, this study is replicate research in order to further investigate the sex difference in selective attention through a video game. Despite of that, there was also research claimed to find no connection between gender and playing video game. For instance, study conducted by Colzato, Pratt, and Hommel using the Posner cueing task (2012) are not sufficient enough to explain the possible function of the sex differences in. Indeed, it explained the difference in hormonal aspect but not in the term in selective visual attention.
Research Design
This study used an experimental qualitative research method. As for the quantitative part is by generating the data obtained based on questionnaires and lead to the hypotheses and theory. As for experimental methods, this study provides an approach in which the gender and criteria of participants to be controlled by the researcher in order to retain any changes towards other variables of measuring visual selective attention.
Participants
The participant is expected to be recruit among the undergraduate’s student in UNIMAS, Kota Samarahan, Sarawak. The sampling technique used for this study is a stratified random sampling since we might recruit the participants from their background and courses. The population is divided into some various background such as gender, race, age, educational level and some more. Hence, this technique is used wants to understand the existing factors between the gender related to the dependent variables.
Instruments
As for the preliminary recruitment, the participants from both genders is provided to answer the video game questionnaire to determine the required criteria of participants who play the games. Then, the participant is required to play a video game (PUBG) in order to directly observe their response and attention during playing the game.
Research Procedures
In this study, the participant is needed to fill out the video game questionnaire that indicates their amount of time spends playing video games. The questionnaires also showed their preferred genre of game that could influence their interest and performance in the attentional task. The participants that fit the criteria are then asked to participate in this experiment. A pilot test on the video games is conducted before letting the participant involved in the experiment of playing games. This could reduce the error emission in term of system or misunderstand of the questionnaires provided. It also could specify the possible time for the participant to complete the experiment conducted. The performance of score between female gamers and male gamers are compared on the measure of interest and an effect of action, as well as their response or attention during the experiment is observed. After the experiment, their opinion about playing the game is recorded to assist more understanding in reporting the result.
Data Analysis
Since this study used experimental quantitative research, the result of data could be shown as a verification using the SPPS statistical data collection which will be helped in this study. Other than that, the quantitative data could be used to generalize the other method findings regarding this topic (Lobe, 2008). Once the score is obtained, it will measure and identified, the gender variables as potential predict of a group that performed in term of visual selective attention on a video game. It can generalize the finding in term of gender based on the questionnaires answered.
From the experimental approach, the researcher could observe and record their performance and visual attention during playing video games. The researcher also could observe the participants’ manipulation of attentional during the experiment. There might exist in term of the behavioural observation among the participants throughout the event. All the data collected from both quantitative and experimental method are being compared and analyzed in order to differentiate their visual selective attention throughout the event.
