Research Article The Influence of Action Video Gaming Experience on the Perception of Emotional Faces and Emotional Word Meaning Yuening Yan , 1,2 Yi Li , 1,2 Xinyu Lou, 1,2 Senqi Li, 1,2 Yutong Yao, 3 Diankun Gong , 1,2 Weiyi Ma , 4 and Guojian Yan 1,2 1 The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for Neuroinformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China 2 Center for Information in Medicine, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China 3 Faculty of Natural Science, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK 4 School of Human Environmental Sciences, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Diankun Gong; gdk2010@gmail.com, Weiyi Ma; weiyima@uark.edu, and Guojian Yan; yanguojian_2020@sina.com Received 31 August 2020; Revised 30 December 2020; Accepted 6 May 2021; Published 22 May 2021 Academic Editor: Jianzhong Su Copyright © 2021 Yuening Yan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Action video gaming (AVG) experience has been found related to sensorimotor and attentional development. However, the influence of AVG experience on the development of emotional perception skills is still unclear. Using behavioral and ERP measures, this study examined the relationship between AVG experience and the ability to decode emotional faces and emotional word meanings. AVG experts and amateurs completed an emotional word-face Stroop task prior to (the pregaming phase) and after (the postgaming phase) a 1 h AVG session. Within-group comparisons showed that after the 1 h AVG session, a more negative N400 was observed in both groups of participants, and a more negative N170 was observed in the experts. Between-group comparisons showed that the experts had a greater change of N170 and N400 amplitudes across phases than the amateurs. The results suggest that both the 1 h and long-term AVG experiences may be related to an increased difficulty of emotional perception. Furthermore, certain behavioral and ERP measures showed neither within- nor between-group differences, suggesting that the relationship between AVG experience and emotional perception skills still needs further research. 1. Introduction Video gaming is becoming an increasingly important part of our entertainment experience. Population-based research suggests that 79.9% of 5- to 17-year-olds and 31.3% of adults spend some time on video gaming on a daily basis [1]. A report of the Entertainment Software Association shows that 63% of U.S. households surveyed have at least one frequent gamer (http://www.theesa.com/about-esa/esa- annual-report/). Video gaming offers a new approach to acquiring knowledge and to facilitating cognitive develop- ment, thus providing us with a new, important venue for understanding learning-related cognitive and neural plastic- ity. Using both behavioral and neuroscience methods, this study explores the relationship between action video gaming (AVG) experience and emotional perception performance. A major genre of video gaming, AVG emphasizes physi- cal and cognitive challenges, such as hand-eye coordination [2], stimulus detection and analysis [3], and decision- making under time pressure [4], just like traditional sports. Researchers have proposed that AVG experience induces plasticity of brain function and structure [5]. This proposi- tion is supported by the findings that AVG experience is related to improvements in various cognitive functions (e.g., selective attention [6, 7], spatial distribution of visuospatial attention [8, 9], attentional capture [10], and behavioral performance in tasks of working memory and vision [11]) and the plasticity of brain structure and neutral network Hindawi Neural Plasticity Volume 2021, Article ID 8841156, 12 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/8841156