Our attentional system operates on multiple levels of information processing streams. Much of the research on attention has examined participants’ ability to process stimuli outside of their current attentional selection (e.g., Lavie et al., 2014 Mack & Rock, 1998 Simons & Chabris, 1999).

As such, attention plays a pivotal role in our conscious perception, and understanding its cognitive mechanisms has important theoretical and practical implications. We also discuss possible attentional mechanisms for the changes in recognition rates and the implications for applications such as serious games.Īttention allows us to selectively process information by diverting cognitive resources towards the attended stimulus and away from other unattended stimuli (Carrasco, 2011 Desimone & Duncan, 1995). The consistency of this attentional selection is moderated by the level of immersion in the game. This reduced retention is due to differences in attentional set rather than a response to limited processing resources. We conclude that games create sustained attentional selection away from task-irrelevant features, even if they are in full view, which leads to reduced retention. Experiments 3 and 4 found that post-game image recognition was very low if the images were irrelevant to the game task but significantly higher if the images were relevant to the task. For the more immersive game post-game recognition of images was very low, but for the less immersive game it was significantly higher. Experiments 1 and 2 compared two versions of the game Two Dots, each containing a sequence of images. We performed four experiments using self-paced video games to investigate whether sustained attentional selection of features could be created without a distractor task requiring continuous processing. Feature-based attention allocates resources to particular stimulus features and reduces processing and retention of unattended features.

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