Video game experience and basic robotic skills

Virtual reality simulators have emerged as valuable tools for standardized and objective robotic surgery skill training and assessments. In recent years the idea of using video game technology in surgical education for laparoscopy has also been explored, however few have attempted to make a connection between video game experience and robotic surgical skills. Thus, the current study aims to examine the performance of video gamers in a virtual reality robotic surgery simulator. Furthermore, the video gamers' performance was compared to that of medical students, expert robotic surgeons, and “laypeople.” The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that video gamers acquire perceptual and psychomotor skills through video game play, similar to those used by robotic surgeons. Subjects completed a demographic questionnaire and performed three computer-based perceptual tests: a Flanker compatibility task, a subsidizing task, and a Multiple Object Tracking test. Participants then performed two warm-up exercises and eight trials of two core exercises on a robotic surgery simulator. After completing all trials, participants completed a post-questionnaire regarding their experience with the system. Expert video gamers (n=40), medical students (n=24), laypeople (n=42) and expert robotic surgeons (n=16) were recruited. Medical students and gamers were significantly faster than experts in the Flanker Task. The experts were significantly slower than the all other groups in the subsidizing task. Experts scored significantly higher, were significantly more efficient, and were significantly faster than laypeople, medical students, and gamers in the first trial of Ring & Rail 1 and Suture Sponge. In trial eight of the simulation exercises, the experts performed significantly better than most groups in all of the metrics. Contrary to prior literature in laparoscopy, this study was unable to validate enhanced abilities of video gamers in a robotic surgery simulator. This study does further demonstrate that the transfer of skills developed through video game play is relevant to the surgical technique. This may be due to the differences of the systems and how the users interact within them. In a society where video games have become an integral past time, it is important to determine the role that video games play in the perceptual and psychomotor development of users. These findings can be generalized to domains outside of medicine that utilize robotic and computer-controlled systems, speaking to the scope of the gamers' abilities and pointing to the capacity within these systems.