@inproceedings{baughan2024dissociation, author = {Baughan, Amanda and Fu, Yue and Izenman, Emily and Schwamm, Samuel and Alsabeh, Dania and Powell, Nicole and Hunt, Elizabeth and Rich, Michael and Bickham, David and Radesky, Jenny and Hiniker, Alexis}, title = {Investigating Attention and Normative Dissociation in Children's Social Video Games}, year = {2024}, isbn = {9798400704420}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3655808}, doi = {10.1145/3628516.3655808}, abstract = {Children’s video games are controversial for their deeply engrossing nature. We conducted an interview and observational study with 17 eight-to-thirteen-year-olds to examine how they deploy their attention while gaming. In sessions of 60-75 minutes, a research assistant toured either Roblox or Minecraft, following the lead of a child participant. We analyzed a segment of these interviews to understand participants’ patterns of normative dissociation—experiences of complete cognitive absorption that exclude processing of the environment beyond the focus of attention. Our analysis revealed that many of our participants had experiences that fit the model of normative dissociation. Participants reported becoming deeply absorbed in games to the point of losing track of time and not paying attention to their surroundings. Game design influenced children’s patterns of normative dissociation, and in particular, user-paced traveling through the game environment and game-initiated pauses allowed children to more easily attend to stimuli outside the game. We recommend parental controls leverage these points of game play to collaboratively support children’s time management during gameplay.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference}, pages = {30–43}, numpages = {14}, keywords = {attention, normative dissociation, social gaming, youth gaming}, location = {Delft, Netherlands}, series = {IDC '24} }