The phenomenon, known as ‘emotion-induced blindness’, does not prove that video games cause violent behaviour, researchers say

People who frequently play violent video games are less affected by violent or distressing images, a new study has found.

The research from the University of New South Wales did not find that video game players were more violent or aggressive, but that violent images had less of an effect in distracting their vision when they were searching for something else.

In the experiment, people were shown 17 images of neutral landscapes in a quick flashing sequence. They were told to try and pick out one image that had been rotated sideways and remember which direction it was rotated.

However, researchers also included images of violence, or disgusting images like dirty toilet bowls, to confuse the participants.

They found that people who frequently played violent video games were less distracted by the confronting images, and could more easily ignore them to pick out the target image.

The lead author, Dr Steve Most, said this was due to a phenomenon known as “emotion-induced blindness”.

“It’s such a striking and robust effect, we never run a study where we don’t get that basic effect,” he said.

“People who are looking for a target in a rapid stream of images, if there is an emotional picture there, it hurts people’s ability to see what they are looking for.”

Those who frequently played violent games – defined in the study as playing more than five hours a week of games that “often” featured violence – had less emotion-induced blindness.

However he stressed that the study did not prove that video games caused the difference in perception, or violent behaviour.

“There will be a great temptation for people to conclude from this that playing a lot of video games causes people to be less sensitive to emotional information – but we can’t say anything about whether it causes it,” he said.

“We don’t know if it is causal. We are also not saying anything about violent video game players and moral sensitivity or aggression. There’s very mixed evidence whether playing violent video games will affect someone’s behaviour … We’re just looking at how it relates to perceptual experience.”

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Researchers also used distractor images that were neutral, and had no violent connotations, such as images of people or animals. In these experiments, there was no difference in accuracy between gamers and non-gamers – which ruled out the possibility that video game players had better visual attention overall.

Most said the researchers also wanted to be “careful” about the debate and more research was needed.

He said it wasn’t necessarily true that video game players ignored the distressing images because they were morally desensitised to violence.

“There are other examples you can think of that would be harder to make that claim. Take a first year group of medical students and compare them to third year students. It’s possible the more advanced students would experience less emotion-induced blindness when exposed to images of physical trauma – they are more used to seeing it.

“In that case you wouldn’t say that becoming a more accomplished doctor means you become morally desensitised. I can’t say for sure that our findings among violent video players have nothing to do with moral desensitisation, but that it is something that would need to be investigated further.”