The effects of task activities and gaming scales on eye reading and visual search performance

The effects of video gaming have been explored extensively in many learning-related fields. However, limited research has investigated whether the frequencies of exposing to gaming environments influence students' Chinese reading comprehension, arithmetic word problem test, spatial recognition, and graphical patterns recognition. To address this issue, this study adopted eye-tracking technology to explore learners' reading and visual search responses on various reading materials. Task effects and correlation analyses were conducted on a sample of 19 sophomores with varying gaming frequencies, eye reading fixations, and regressions. The results revealed that practice makes users have fewer fixation frequencies on a similar task. Meanwhile, the results demonstrated a positive gaming frequency correlation on eye fixations and regressions for Chinese reading comprehension and arithmetic word problem test, and a negative gaming frequency correlation for spatial and graphical patterns recognition tasks.