In video war games, are military personnel’s fixation patterns different compared with those of civilians?
Journal article, 2014

For combat personnel in urban operations, situational awareness is critical and of major importance for a safe and efficient performance. One way to train situational awareness is to adopt video games. Twenty military and 20 civilian subjects played the game ‘‘Close Combat: First to Fight’’ on two different platforms, Xbox and PC, wearing an eye tracker. The purpose was to investigate if the visual search strategies used in a game correspond to live training, and how militarytrained personnel search for visual information in a game environment. A total of 27,081 fixations were generated through a centroid mode algorithm and analyzed frame-by-frame, 48% of them from military personnel. Military personnel’s visual search strategies were different from those of civilians. Fixation durations were, however, equally short, that is, about 170 ms, for both groups. Surprisingly, the military-trained personnel’s fixation patterns were less orientated towards tactical objects and areas of interest than the civilians’; the underlying mechanisms remaining unclear. Military training was apparently not advantageous with respect to playing ‘‘Close Combat: First to Fight’’. Further research within the area of gaming, military training and visual search strategies is warranted.

Expert

Eye tracking

Military training

Visual search patterns

Video war game

First person shooter

Author

Håkan Söderberg

Chalmers, Shipping and Marine Technology, Division of Maritime Operations

Junaid Khalid

Linköping University

Mohammed Rayees

Linköping University

Joakim Dahlman

Chalmers, Shipping and Marine Technology, Nautical Studies

Torbjörn Falkmer

La Trobe University

Linköping University

Curtin University

Jönköping University

Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation

1548-5129 (ISSN) 1557380x (eISSN)

Vol. 11 4 329-338

Subject Categories

Interaction Technologies

Human Computer Interaction

Media Engineering

DOI

10.1177/1548512912467867

More information

Latest update

11/25/2022