A feature and conjunction visual search immersive virtual reality serious game for measuring spatial and distractor inhibition attention using response time and action kinematics

ABSTRACT

Background

Treisman (1980) proposed that visual-spatial attention to targets presented with distractors involves parallel and serial cognition. When the target is different from distractors by a single feature, the number of distractors does not influence search speed (parallel). However, when the target is different from the distractor by a conjunction of features, increased numbers of distractors increase task difficulty (serial). Here, we developed a serious game in immersive virtual reality (IVR) for evaluating spatial and distractor inhibition attention.

Methods

We tested 60 healthy participants. They performed the serious game in which they had to find a target mole wearing a red miner’s helmet. In the single feature parallel conditions, the distractor moles wore blue (miner’s or horned) helmets, and in the conjunction feature serial conditions, the distractor moles wore blue miner’s helmets or red horned helmets. There were 11–17–23 distractors. Responses were made with the dominant hand by hitting the target with a virtual hammer. We measured mean response time (RT), mean velocity (MV) and coefficient of variance of speed (CV).

Results

Participants were significantly slower (RT and MV) and showed greater CV when responding to targets in conjunction compared to single feature search tasks. Further, participants were slower (RT and MV) and showed greater CV when the number of distractors increased. A significant interaction between search tasks and distractors showed that RT and CV only increased with distractor number for the conjunction search tasks. MV decreased with distractor number for both single and conjunction tasks, with a stronger decrease for conjunction relative to single feature search.

Conclusion

The results replicated previous findings, providing support for the use of immersive virtual reality technology for the simultaneous evaluation of spatial and distractor inhibition attention using complex 3D objects.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual search
• serious game
• spatial attention
• inhibition
• executive function
• kinematics
• immersive virtual reality

Data availability statement

The raw data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the open data archive of University of Louvain (https://dataverse.uclouvain.be/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.14428/DVN/1BKFA6).

Ethics approval and consent to participate

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The Saint-Luc-UCLouvain-Hospital-Faculty Ethics Committee approved the study (reference number:2015/10FEV/053).

Acknowledgments

We thank Stéphane Grade, Camille Ganci and Anthony Garcia for technical support for the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13803395.2023.2218571.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Région Wallonne, the SPW-Economie-Emploi-Recherche and the Win2Wal Program (convention no. SPE-Economie-Emploi-Recherche and Win²Wal Program 1810108); SPE-Economie-Emploi-Recherche and Win²Wal Program AU: The funding information SPE-Economie-Emploi-Recherche and Win²Wal Program provided has been checked against the Open Funder Registry and we failed to find a match. Please confirm if the Funding section is accurate and also confirm the funder name SPE-Economie-Emploi-Recherche and Win²Wal Program. 1810108.