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?

Brain Training

Elizabeth Zelinski of the University of Southern California reports on the old-fashioned way of doing brain training (i.e. before FPS training :-) ) in a large scale RCT with some nice methodological touches. The training program seems to be based on auditory and mouse exercises. Here's the poster that was presented at Gerontological Society Meetings in San Francisco last weekend.

The generalization of training is an interesting finding, similar to FPS training results. If we use video games to do something similar with seniors we should think about comparing our results to this rather different, but seemingly effective, approach to brain training.

Zelinski and her colleagues used Brain Fitness 2.0 from Posit Science (a commercial brain training site) and the study was funded by the same company (conflict of interest here?).

Newsweek has a feature on the study.

Vestibular Speculation

David Ethan Kennerly has an interesting speculation on his blog. He suggests that "there is an adaptation process that is occuring for FPS players who do not experience" FPS-induced mild motion sickness. As we know from our studies, some participants do experience mild nausea which seems to go away after an hour or two. Ethan Kennerly says "the ability to decouple vestibular and motion feedback might correlate to improvements in mental rotation, since mental rotation necessarily decouples the stable (non-rotating) vestibular state from the rotation task."

This is an interesting speculation and I am not sure what to make of it at the moment. Maybe we should start to track this phenomenon in future training studies and see whether it correlates with improvements in performance. I don't know much about vestibular-visual interactions but there must be a huge literature out there, especially since this has been a big issue in the space program.