Effects of soundtrack music on the video game experience

ABSTRACT

Aesthetic elements such as soundtrack music have been neglected in game entertainment research. Based on previous work in games research and the psychology of film soundtracks (Cohen, 2001), we test the hypotheses that soundtrack music contributes to players‘ enjoyment via intensification of emotions (affective route) and via amplification of the sense of spatial presence and identification with the game character (cognitive routes). Study 1 tested these assumptions with N = 68 young male players of an episode of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag^®, either with the original soundtrack music present or absent, and reported game enjoyment, as well as scores of the assumed mediator variables afterward. In Study 2, N = 59 young males played an episode of Alien: Isolation^® with soundtrack music present or absent and reported their horror experience, as well as the experiential facets as in study 1. Findings clearly show an indirect effect of soundtrack music on enjoyment through positive emotions (study 1) and an impact of (shocking) music on players’ horror experience (study 2). However, a mediation of the effect of soundtrack music on game enjoyment via spatial presence or identification was not established. We discuss implications for future research in game entertainment.     

Persistence of preference for a flavor presented in simultaneous compound with sucrose

Rats exposed to a simultaneous compound of a flavor and sucrose subsequently exhibited a preference for the flavor over water. This preference persisted across repeated testing even though the flavor was presented in the absence of sucrose. The preference did, however, extinguish if the rats were hungry when trained or tested, or if they had been reexposed to sucrose between training and test. Though failing to extinguish the preference, presentation of the flavor outside the compound protected it from the effects of sucrose devaluation, indicating that these presentations extinguished the within-compound association between the flavor and sucrose. The authors conclude that the hedonic reaction elicited by sucrose imbues the flavor with the same hedonic properties, and these properties maintain the preference independently of the flavor-sucrose association.     

Phonological priming reflects lexical competition

A phonological relationship between a prime and a target produces facilitation when one or two initial phonemes are shared (low-similarity facilitation) but produces interference when more phonemes are shared (high-similarity interference; Slowiaczek & Hamburger, 1992). Although low-similarity facilitation appears to be a strategic effect (Goldinger, Luce, Pisoni, & Marcario, 1992), this result cannot generalize to high-similarity interference because the two effects are dissociated (Slowiaczek & Hamburger, 1992). In the present study, strategic processing in high-similarity interference was investigated. The phonological relatedness proportion (PRP) and the prime-target interstimulus interval (ISI) were varied in a shadowing experiment. Low-similarity facilitation was found only with a high PRP and long ISI, but high-similarity interference was found regardless of PRP and ISI. These results suggest that strategies influence low-similarity facilitation, but high-similarity interference reflects automatic processing.     

A critical review of the cognitive and perceptual factors influencing attentional scaling and visual processing

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - An important mechanism used to selectively process relevant information in the environment is spatial attention. One fundamental way in which spatial attention...     

Fundamentalist Protestant Christian Women: Recognizing Cultural and Gender Influences on Domestic Violence

The authors use multicultural, family process and structure, and gender concepts to provide a framework for understanding the supports for and barriers to mental health that are experienced by abused fundamentalist Protestant Christian (FPC) women. For FPC women who are victims of domestic violence, gender, culture, and family process and structure may intersect to prohibit or facilitate healthy life choices. Suggestions for providing counseling services to this population are given.     

Testing the Role of Verbal Narration in Implicit Theory of Mind Tasks

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to agents, has usually been measured with explicit verbal tasks and found to develop slowly during the preschool years. New implicit ToM measures have lately revolutionized the field by suggesting that ToM may be present much earlier in development. However, recent replication studies of implicit ToM present a complex pattern of failed, partial and successful attempts. The big challenge is to identify an underlying system to this pattern that can explain why some tasks replicate while others do not. The rationale of the present study was to address this challenge by investigating one potential factor that may explain patterns of (non-)replications of implicit measures, namely elements of verbal narration in anticipatory looking tasks. Sixty-seven 4- to 5-year-old children completed modified versions of two different anticipatory looking implicit false belief tasks which recently proved difficult to replicate. The main modification was that verbal narration was added to the original stimulus videos. Results revealed that original looking patterns could still not be replicated. There was no improvement in one task, while a slight improvement was observed in the other task. In conclusion, adding verbal narration does not necessarily improve the replicability of anticipatory ToM tasks, suggesting either that these measures might not be sufficiently sensitive to tap implicit ToM, or that other factors are crucial for successful replications.     

The effects of repeated idea elaboration on unconscious plagiarism

Unconscious plagiarism occurs in a recall task when someone presents someone else’s idea as his or her own. Recent research has shown that the likelihood of such an error is inflated if the idea is improved during the retention interval, but not if it is imagined. Here, we explore the effects of repeating the elaboration phase during the retention interval. Participants in a group first generated alternate uses to common objects before elaborating the ideas either by imagining them or by improving them. This elaboration phase occurred once, twice, or not at all. Later, they attempted to recall their original ideas and generate new ideas. Repeated imagery did not inflate unconscious plagiarism on either task. In contrast, repeating the improvement phase increased plagiarism to dramatically high levels in the recall task. The latter effect might be particularly pertinent to real-world cases of plagiarism in which the ideas under dispute have been the subject of creative development over many occasions.     

Upper-left gaze bias reveals competing search strategies in a reverse Stroop task

Three experiments with a total of 87 human observers revealed an upper-left spatial bias in the initial movement of gaze during visual search. The bias was present whether or not the explicit control of gaze was required for the task. This bias may be part of a search strategy that competed with the fixed-gaze parallel search strategy hypothesized by Durgin [Durgin, F. H. (2003). Translation and competition among internal representations in a reverse Stroop effect. Perception &Psychophysics, 65, 367-378.] for this task. When the spatial probabilities of the search target were manipulated either in accord with or in opposition to the existing upper-left bias, two orthogonal factors of interference in the latency data were differentially affected. The two factors corresponded to two different forms of representation and search. Target probabilities consistent with the gaze bias encouraged opportunistic serial search (including gaze shifts), while symmetrically opposing target probabilities produced latency patterns more consistent with parallel search based on a sensory code.