What is it about?
We talk about games as viewed as vehicles for cognitive psychology research. Three large categories are discussed: gamification, games as treatment conditions, and game-XP. My heart is in the Game-XP category which focuses on on the basic processes of cognition, perception, action, dynamic decision making, method discovery, and skill acquisition. However, in contrast to most of the "extremely simple paradigms (ESPs) used by the field, Game-XP also focuses on how the various cognitive processes act together in the acquisition and performance of manageably complex behavior.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Looking “inside games” we will find “manageably” complex task environments in which we can study the interactions of decision-making, actions, perceptual processing, memory, and other cognitive processes. This “inside games” perspective is contrasted with the more common use of games “as treatment conditions” in which pre- and post-text are administered to determine if the game-play experience changed any factors but the activities performed inside-games are ignored.
Perspectives
Games have been used in cognitive psychology research at least since Manny Donchin's work with Space Fortress in the 1980's and 1990's. Before then, in 1983 Geoffrey Loftus and Elizabeth Loftus published a popular book called "Mind at Play.'' Several labs (including mine) are still using Space Fortress -- our SF study required each player to play in 31 1-hr sessions. The of even a simple game like Space Fortress to motivate players is astounding. We certainly could not have kept them coming if our study was a 31, hour-long sessions of, say, n-back, Stroop task, etc, etc.
Professor Wayne D. Gray
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Game-XP: Action Games as Experimental Paradigms for Cognitive Science, Topics in Cognitive Science, March 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12260.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
