Action video games (AVGs) as digital therapeutics for enhancing visual selective attention in adults: a pilot study

Background Selective attention is crucial for filtering relevant information, and its impairment is associated with various disorders. Action video games (AVGs) have been suggested to enhance selective attention, but their long-term effects and therapeutic potential remain understudied.Methods Participants were randomly assigned to either the AVG or the control group and underwent an 8-month training program with five weekly sessions. The correlations between functional connectivity (FC) changes and reaction time (RT) improvement were analyzed after training. To predict and evaluate the effect of subjects on digital therapeutics before training, the participants were categorized into low-, medium-, and high-performance groups based on RT improvement and further classified using pre-training EEG data with support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbors (KNN) models.Results The AVG group showed significantly greater RT improvement compared to controls. Reduced FC between the frontal and parietal lobes was associated with RT improvement. SVM and KNN classifiers achieved around 80% accuracy and AUC values of 0.87 and 0.90, effectively predicting training outcomes.Conclusion This study demonstrates the effectiveness of AVGs in enhancing selective attention, highlighting their potential as digital therapeutics for cognitive enhancement.