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Updated: Nov 22, 2025
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation for Online Gamers
Published on: November 9, 2019
Impaired disengagement of attention from computer-related stimuli in Internet Gaming Disorder: Behavioral and
Anna Heuer1, Manuel Mennig2, Anna Schubö3
11Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Background And Aims:
Attentional biases contribute to the maintenance of addictive behaviors. For the problematic use of online gaming - recognized as Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) - first evidence points to a bias towards in-game stimuli. This study aimed to provide behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for a generalized bias towards computer-related stimuli, and to identify the specific attentional processes contributing to this bias: facilitated attention deployment, impaired disengagement or failed suppression.
Method:
Twenty participants with IGD and 23 casual gamers performed a visual search task with photographs of real-world objects. Either the target or a to-be-ignored distractor was addiction-relevant (computer-related), whereas all other items were addiction-irrelevant (related to cars or sport). Event-related potential components associated with facilitated attentional deployment to the target (NT), its post-selection processing (SPCN), and suppression of irrelevant information (PD) were analyzed.
Results:
Unlike casual gamers, gamers with IGD exhibited prolonged reaction times and increased SPCN amplitudes for computer-related stimuli, reflecting their continued attentional processing. At the individual level, larger SPCN amplitudes were associated with longer delays in reaction time.
Discussion And Conclusions:
This pattern of results indicates that the disengagement of attention from computer-related stimuli is impaired in IGD. More generally, our findings demonstrate that conditioning processes occur in IGD, and thus open up new avenues for treatment.
