Gaming and Vigilance: How Video Game Pursuit Relates to Performance, Stress, and Workload

Humans have a history of failing to sustain attention. This failure has often led to fatal and catastrophic consequences in safety-critical domains despite extensive operator training. With the widespread, and quickly evolving, advancement of technology, more people are having to “play monitor” in human-machine systems. Therefore, continued research in this field is imperative. One avenue of investigation that may prove useful to practitioners is the role that individual differences play in vigilance. In this work we assess the effects of video game pursuit, intimidation, and frequency on vigilance task performance as well as task induced stress and workload. The results of our analyses show that those who score higher on the VGPu exhibit poorer performance but are more resistant to performance decline. We also found that those who report more frequent gameplay outperform those who play video games less often.