Area of Research for a Ph.D. Student?

Here's an interesting experiment summarized in the New Scientist. By tracking eye movements, the study's authors presented new objects in areas that were not being attended to. The relevance to FPS video games is obvious, but this approach also gives us a way to study how we allocate attention.

Maybe this will inspire some of you in the lab to think of experiments that could form the basis of a thesis ... The New Scientist article gives a link to the authors' website at McGill where you can find the articles.

Your Brain on Video Games

Video Games Activate Reward Regions Of Brain In Men More Than Women--so says a new study reported in Science Daily. 11 males and 11 females played a simple video game that was designed especially for the experiment. The game was a kind of space invaders type of game where balls keep coming from the right and you have to click on them (destroying them) before they hit a wall. If you are successful the wall (a vertical line) moves to the right and you "gain territory."

Participants were imaged using fMRI. Based on the Science Daily report, men and women performed similarly on the game but the men showed more activation in the nucleus accumbens, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. The authors interpreted this as showing that the men found gaining territory "more rewarding."

Hard to know what to make of this one until I read the original paper. There are some questions not answered by the Science Daily synopsis. Were the participants gamers or non-gamers, for example? That would make a difference ...

P.S. Jing's study is quoted in the "Related stories" column at right on the Science Daily page.

Wii Training Helps Surgical Skills

An article in the New Scientist describes a study where surgeons played with a Wii for only a short time before doing simulated surgery. Wii players did better than nonplayers.

But is this really a training effect or is it just a warmup effect produced by engaging in a similar activity beforehand?

Testing Cognitive Speed

Here's a study that tests speed of cognitive processing by using a video game like program. It is based on theory developed by Cattell, Horn and Carroll (over many year) which has recently received new attention.

I'd be interested in hearing your ideas relating this work to what is going on in our lab.

Great GPS Nav Visualization

This in-car navigation visualization looks like a terrific idea. It's simple, heads-up, and will work in the dark. So far it seems to exist in demo-only form but if it works in on-the-road conditions it will be much better than in-dash systems which require the driver to look away from the road, thus dividing attention. Additionally, existing systems need the driver to correlate the suggested route with a visualization of the route. This system would overlay the route on the actual environment! Couple the red line visualization with voice directions (which already exist in GPS nav in-car systems) and this looks like a winner.

Shoot First, Ace Geometry Later

Scientific American Mind has a short piece on our Psychological Science study on the effect of action video game playing on gender differences in spatial cognition. Cute title! But it's a pity they didn't get the name of the lead author right.

Highlighting Found Items

Jason Wong's blog has an interesting piece on locating searched-for items in a browser window. He compares Firefox and Safari. The attentional capture features of the Safari browser are neat. Maybe this idea could be adapted for other purposes such as IM notification in the periphery with large screens?