Engineering Psychology Laboratory

Area of Research for a Ph.D. Student?

2008-02-14T08:54:00.004-05:00

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

2008-02-05T10:00:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-23T14:31:00.001-05:00

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

2008-01-21T09:54:00.000-05:00

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

2007-12-12T11:15:00.000-05:00

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

2007-12-06T09:03:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-24T11:41:00.001-05:00

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

2007-11-21T14:15:00.001-05:00

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

2007-11-20T17:45:00.000-05:00

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.

Flash Focus

2007-11-13T15:07:00.000-05:00

Here's a $20 application for the Nintendo DS handheld gaming device (which costs about $130). It's called Flash Focus and it is supposed to improve your vision. You can get an idea of the various exercises--the web site has flash simulations of the games.

The software was developed according to theories due to Hisao Ishigaki of the Aichi Institute of Technology. Comments on Wikipedia seem to suggest that reviewers didn't think much of its ability to improve vision. They compared it unfavourably to Nintendo's earlier Brain Age.

Two of the games (Baseball and Table Tennis) are probably more fun than the psychologically motivated practice tasks. But would someone not be better off training on a Wii? I think that there are some research issues worth exploring here.

The Star

2007-11-12T08:43:00.000-05:00

Jing and her research were profiled in The Toronto Star last week. A nice article and just in time for her 25th birthday!!

Visit to McMaster

2007-11-11T10:55:00.002-05:00

We had a very interesting visit to McMaster on Friday. We were hosted by Daphne Maurer and Terri Lewis who are conducting video gaming training studies with amblyopes. They hope to be able to replace some of the current tedious training tasks to improve vision in adult amblyopes with more interesting and engaging video games that can be played at home, rather than have the patient come to a clinic or lab.

We also visited Judy Shedden's lab and had a very enjoyable discussion with Judy and Scott Watter and some of their students (Jim, Patrick, and Michelle). They have several experiments in progress, or planned, and it will be interesting to see how they turn out. Judy is an expert in ERP methods and has started to look at the differences between gamers and non-gamers using that tool. Then we toured Hong-Jin Sun's lab and met with his group who are doing work on spatial cognition. One of their lines of research uses a DriveSafety driving simulator and they can measure UFOV during the driving task. Jing had a go in the simulator and ran into the back of a police car. Women drivers ;-) ;-)

We ended our visit by giving a talk ("Sex, lies, and videogames") on our research at Toronto. We described the recent work done by Sijing, Alina, Jing, and Jessica. The talk seemed to be well received and we got many questions during and after the talk.

It was a good way to spend a Friday and it will be great to go back again sometime soon to hear how the video game research at McMaster is progressing. It was great to be in a department where so many people are doing cutting edge research in perception!

What we can learn from gamers

2007-11-05T16:44:00.000-05:00

Some interesting thoughts about what gamers can teach us.

A psychologist comments on the Psychological Science article

2007-11-03T21:25:00.000-04:00

There are some interesting comments on Laura's Psychology Blog

Science Daily profiles Jing's paper

2007-10-24T17:34:00.000-04:00

More coverage of Jing's paper in Science Daily.

GAMEspot blog on Jing's paper

2007-10-24T10:27:00.000-04:00

There are lots of comments on Jing's Psychological Science article on GAMEspot. Some are quite funny, check 'em out!

Video game reduces stress hormone

2007-10-24T09:03:00.001-04:00

Here's an interesting study from McGill. "A video game designed by McGill University researchers to help train people to change their perception of social threats and boost their self-confidence has now been shown to reduce the production of the stress-related hormone cortisol." See link here