Motivation has been found to direct our attention across a number of studies. In the literature, this phenomenon is referred to as motivated cognition. The present study seeks to extend the work on motivated cognition to an applied setting: video gaming. We measured memory recall performance on a 20-minute game-based attention task. Forty-nine (27 females; 22 males) undergraduate students viewed a sequence of four game-based videos that required them to monitor the video for a number of enemy threats and non-threats, as well as contextual information. The results indicated that those higher in intrinsic motivation were more likely to correctly detect and subsequently recall threat, non-threat, and contextual information. Gamers significantly outperformed non-gamers in this task across all performance measures. We concluded that motivated cognition is indeed influenced by individual differences such as motivation and interest in the activity.
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