Skilled musicians, athletes, video game players, or even workers can reach a state where what they do seems to happen naturally. They know exactly what to do, they do not get tired, time seems to transform, and they are at peak performance. This highly desirable state is called the state of flow, also described as “being in the zone”. We were initially interested in this state as it is a fundamental characteristic of human play, in particular in video game play, where it is known to prolong the play experience, providing us with a first measurable state within play behavior.
Though this state has been reported in the last 50 years, it has relied on subjective reports, after the experience of flow had ended. Recently, there have been more efforts to uncover physiological and neural bases of this state, but with no clear consensus yet. One general proposal is that while in flow, all available processing resources should be allocated to the flow activity, and no more available resources should be available for task-irrelevant processes or stimuli, outside of the flow activity. Following this idea, and building from Castellar 2019, we propose a method, using electroencephalography (EEG), to track such attentional resources while engaging in distinct levels of flow in video game play while concurrently attending to an auditory oddball task. We hypothesized that while in high flow, the oddball auditory signals should receive fewer processing resources than when participants are in a lesser flow state, which should translate to slower reaction times for the response to the oddball sounds, more errors, as well as lower amplitude or delayed latencies for stimulus locked N1 and P3 complex event-related potentials (ERPs).
We recruited participants who were able to play a video game of the First-/ Third-person shooter games genre and had them play at a level of high flow of the video game and a level of low flow of the same video game, with both levels tailored to each participant. At the same time, they were presented with auditory oddball stimuli and EEG signals were recorded throughout. In the active paradigm, forty participants were tasked to both play the game and respond to an auditory oddball task. In the passive paradigm, forty-six participants were tasked to play the game, but without instructions to respond to the oddball stimuli. For the passive paradigm, only the study is presented and not the data.
In our results for the active paradigm, we did not replicate the findings from Castellar 2019 and did not show any differences between high and low flow conditions in either behavioral responses or any of the ERP components considered. Despite a lack of observed flow effects, these studies justified the relevance and usefulness of using video game play to study play activity and demonstrated the feasibility of brain imaging studies using EEG to evaluate video game performance. Moreover, this thesis reinforces important aspects needed for the design of a robust protocol to address the neural bases of the flow state.
