http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23249242

Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw. 2012 Dec 18. [Epub ahead of print]

Effects of Chronic Video Game Use on Time Perception: Differences Between Sub- and Multi-second Intervals.

Rivero TS, Covre P, Reyes MB, Bueno OF.

Source

1 Department of Psychobiology, Universidade Federal de São Paulo , São Paulo, Brazil .

Abstract

Abstract Even though video game players frequently report losing track of time while playing, few studies have addressed whether there are long-lasting effects of such activity on time perception. We compared the performance of chronic and occasional video game players in sub- and multi-second time perception tasks. Temporal Discrimination and Temporal Bisection tasks, in the range of 100 to 1,000 milliseconds, and Time estimation and Time production tasks, in the range of 5 to 60 seconds, were used to assess sub- and multi-second time perceptions, respectively. Chronic video game players performed significantly better than occasional players on sub-second tasks, but no group difference was found for the multi-second tasks used. Sub- and multi-second time perceptions are associated to different underlying systems: automatic and cognitive controlled for sub- and multi-second tasks, respectively. We argue that video game use seems to induce more efficient implicit, rather than cognitive controlled, processing of time.