Print This PostTask design has become a point of fascination for me. We have the good fortune in neuroscience to have some incredibly elegant experimental paradigms. When walking around posters it’s rare to ever see a methodology repeated. Instead each is customised to address specific hypotheses, while minimising the influence of confounding variables. I think it’s safe to say, that this approach makes good sense. It’s scientific rigour that we’re taught from the early days of our academic journeys. Controlling for extraneous variables so that we can assert any changes in the dependent variable to come from fluctuations in the independent variable. Textbook.
Of course the other most common limitation I hear college students point to is a lack of ecological validity. The artificial environments and stimuli that we use precisely in the name of controlling for nuisance variables aren’t really representative of anything we actually do in our actual lives. Take the field of memory as a prime example for us dementia researchers, where there exists well-established differences in the prospective memory performance of older adults when using naturalistic compared to lab-based tasks.
And so we encounter the age-old paradox that undermines our conclusions as much today as in the first days of ticking metronomes in Wundt’s psychology lab. Do you choose an artificial but strictly controlled task in the name of internal validity? Or do you go for a looser and more realistic framework, accepting the nuisances that involves? If only there was a way to strictly control a complex environment, used to simulate entire worlds filled with cognitive tasks, social interactions, and even multifaceted emotional stakes. And on a completely unrelated note, have you ever played Donkey Kong?
Minecraft, Mario Kart, and monkeys playing PacMan – not a particularly wild Saturday night, but rather a session at this year’s conference for Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, with an intriguing pitch.
Can we use video games to probe more complex and naturalistic behaviours whilst keeping a good level of environmental control? And if so, how?
We’ve already seen some very successful attempts to incorporate gaming elements into our science with the likes of Sea Hero Quest probing a variety of spatial navigation metrics using a downloadable app. We’ve also seen video games take inspiration from the realms of psychology and neuroscience to produce more realistic depictions of mental health, with award-winning game Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 working with a range of academics on their depictions of schizophrenia. Increased collaboration between the video gaming and neuroscience sectors seems to be at the fore of a new age of experimental design, bringing together the well-validated cognitive tasks of the artificial testing lab with a more realistic surface.
The discussions had with fellow video game nerds during the interlude of this conference session may have been some of my favourite conversations at an academic event. How naturalistic could these games become? What new analysis strategies would be needed to accommodate potentially richer datasets? How could artificial intelligence be incorporated to help? What game types would be the easiest to translate into well-known experimental paradigms? By the end of the session we had discussed games to target decision-making, attention, motivation, and social interactions. Everything from the pixelated 2D platformers of the 80s to rogue-like dungeon crawlers and fully rendered mission simulators. A full range of simple and unrealistic, to naturalistic and ludicrously complex.
So, what’s the problem?
I work regularly with volunteers for research studies. Individuals with the best of intentions who selflessly give their time and energy to ensure the next generation may not have to cope with the same problems they do now. Some have a dementia diagnosis, others are cognitively healthy, but I have seen people from both groups struggle with even the simpler computer-based tasks we use routinely in research. Being part of a generation that grew up with this new age of technology, I think it’s easy to forget how non-intuitive it can be for individuals who have had to learn how to use these strange new platforms later in life. And whilst I want to believe that video games may actually provide a more intuitive jumping-off point for our participants, I’m just not sure if that will work out in practise.
But I think it’s an assumption worth testing. Video games could easily go beyond task design, falling into the category of theranostics that is becoming increasing popular. Providing us both with a new platform to study dementia, as well as the potential to better diagnose and even treat it. There is the potential to allow our participants to engage in tasks which are more intuitive and more realistic, whilst maintaining that patented scientific rigour we all know and love. But to achieve that potential I think it’s likely that we’ll need games designed by and for the people we’re working with. I think we need to test these approaches, at a meta level, to see if they really could improve data acquisition and data quality. And I think we need to develop new analysis strategies to make sure we can take advantage of this rich data if and when it comes.
And so, as exciting as it would be, maybe a 3D rendered video game with dragon fighting and tavern brawls isn’t the most appropriate experimental design for my participants. But I think there’s still room for video gaming in the dementia research sphere, and if you do too, then why not reach out, and let’s see if we can make Sonic the Hedgehog the well-respected cognitive task that it ought to be.
Rebecca Williams
Author
Rebecca Williams is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Though originally from ‘up North’ in a small town called Leigh, she did her undergraduate and masters at the University of Oxford before defecting to Cambridge for her doctorate researching Frontotemporal dementia and Apathy. She now spends her days collecting data from wonderful volunteers, and coding. Outside work, she plays board games, and is very crafty, she also has her own YouTube Channel Becky & the Brain.
Adam Smith
Rebecca Williams
Dementia Researcher
Dr Becky Carlyle
Dr Emma Law