International Journal of Comparative Psychology

Individual differences in the effects of stress on causal attribution were studied in the context of a first-person-shooter video game. Participants were tasked with identifying the source of an explosion by repeatedly choosing among three possible enemy targets that were firing their weapons at random. In each trio of possible targets, the true enemy (the cause) produced these explosions at a delay ofeither 0.5, 1.0, or 2.0 seconds and with a probability of 100%, 75%, or 50%; condition varied across trios of targets. In Experiment 1, half of the participants made these choices while under stress (by being under fire by snipers in the hills surrounding the choice area) and half were not under fire. Men had higher accuracies and shorter latencies, and being under fire produced lower accuracy but had no effect on latency. In Experiment 2, a more explicit form of time pressure was used in which participants had a fixed amount of time in which to make their choice. This form of time pressure succeeded in dramatically reducing decision latency with an associated drop in accuracy. There was unreliable evidence of a higher accuracy for men. Neither experiment revealed a relationship between self-reported video game play and performance. The results suggest that causal decisions are negatively affected by time pressure, and the manipulations affected men and women similarly.