Mechanisms of the Game Transfer Phenomena: the Role of Cognitive, Emotional, and Personality Variables

Abstract

Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP) refer to the involuntary transfer of video game experiences into the real world and can manifest as altered sensory perceptions, automatic mental processes, and behavioural responses with video-game content. These experiences are often prompted by external cues related to the video game and occur while performing automatic and cognitively non-demanding tasks. Such habitual daily activities are also conducive to experiencing a variety of spontaneous cognitive phenomena (e.g., mindwandering, involuntary memories, musical earworms) and previous research on GTP has shown that the content and circumstances of GTP experiences bear strong similarities with these spontaneous cognitive phenomena, with the main difference being the video game content in case of GTP. The central aim of this thesis was to explore a novel hypothesis that GTP can be considered as part of a family of spontaneous cognitive phenomena in terms of their frequency, nature and underlying mechanisms. To address this aim, three online and one laboratory study investigated the frequency of GTP and its relation to involuntary cognitive phenomena (daydreaming and mind-popping frequency), psychopathology variables (e.g., schizotypy, anxiety, depression and impulsivity) and cognitive processes (e.g., creativity, working memory capacity) that had been previously associated with involuntary cognitions. The second aim was to provide new evidence about the nature and frequency of GTP in daily life using a structured (online) diary method. The third major aim was to examine the hypothesis that gaming sessions activate a large number of game-related representations that act as primes for subsequent GTP experiences in response to game-related stimuli in one’s environment. Findings across four studies showed that the occurrence of GTP, as assessed by questionnaire and diary methods, tended to be low and closely resembled the frequency reported in the literature for mind-pops. The most prevalent type of GTP were involuntary inner cognitions in the form of thoughts, memories and musical earworms with game-related content, which occurred under very similar circumstances to other spontaneous cognitive phenomena (Study 2). The results of multiple hierarchical regression analyses showed that GTP were predicted by spontaneous cognitions (daydreaming and mind-popping scores) as well as positive schizotypy and the internet gaming disorder (IGD) (Studies 1 to 3). Furthermore, mediation analysis showed that the association of IGD with GTP was partially mediated by positive schizotypy and frequency of mind-pops (Study 1). Results of Study 3 also confirmed that creativity scores predicted GTP, providing further support for potential links between GTP and spontaneous cognitive phenomena. Results of diary Study 2 supported the long-term priming hypothesis by showing that GTP experiences were often reported as being preceded by prior exposure to video games related to the GTP content. The evidence of long-term priming of GTP-related concepts, resulting from playing a video game, was also supported in the laboratory using a lexical decision task over short (10 minutes) and longer delays of 24 hours (Study 4). However, no associations were found between GTP and priming scores in the online word-fragment completion task (Study 3) and the laboratory lexical decision task (Study 4), which calls for further examination of the priming hypothesis in the context of GTP. Taken together, these findings have significant theoretical, methodological and practical implications for research on GTP and involuntary cognitions. Indeed, not only did they replicate some of the findings reported in previous research on GTP, but they also significantly extended the current knowledge on the frequency, nature, and possible underlying mechanisms of GTP. The consistent similarities of GTP with other spontaneous cognitive phenomena demonstrate that this phenomenon can be considered part of a broad family of spontaneous cognitions and open up interesting avenues for future research.