Sex of player and practice in lateral discrimination and videogame performance.

Videogame sessions stimulating surrogate travel were used as navigational training for four days. Four paper-and-pencil measures were obtained to identify characteristics underlying acquisition of navigational skill. These included a map reading test to assess spatial orientation, a self-report questionnaire (Spatial Anxiety Scale) and two orientation tasks requiring discrimination of compass directions and relative position, i.e., right-left. Game performance was related to both scores on spatial anxiety and right-left discrimination. Skill acquisition curves did not differ for the 8 men and 13 women.

Memory scanning of organized visual material.

A recognition memory experiment investigated memory scanning when stimuli were organized but not easily labeled verbally. Subjects were shown a series of three, four, or five pictures followed by a probe stimulus in a paradigm similar to that introduced by Sternberg. Reaction time to the test stimulus served as the dependent measure. The principle findings indicated that the organization of the to-be-remembered sets had a pronounced influence on performance. When sets were disorganized, the retrieval appeared to be a serial process, since reaction time increased with set size. With organized sets, reaction time was independent of set size, suggesting a parallel search.