Simulations: cognitive or physical? ‑Serious Games Summit

Very fun day at the Seri­ous Games Sum­mit yes­ter­day. I was part of a pan­el on Games that Change Behav­iors or Teach Skills. We had 90–100 peo­ple in the room, who were will­ing to par­tic­i­pate and do the Stroop test aloud to have some fun (many of them being in the mil­i­tary, they were pret­ty good!) and see how dif­fi­cult it may be to inhib­it learned behav­iors. We reviewed the key ele­ments in a pow­er­ful Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram such as Cogmed Work­ing Mem­o­ry Train­ing (now for peo­ple with ADD/ ADHD), RoboMemo. Many inter­est­ing peo­ple, includ­ing from some mil­i­tary train­ing acad­e­mies, came to speak after­wards. Fun.

I shared some of the design impli­ca­tions of try­ing to accom­plish behav­ior change, using RoboMemo as an example:

— Mea­sure clear objec­tive: Teacher and Par­ent Eval­u­a­tions, on top of cog­ni­tive measures

- Assess and Train bot­tle­neck: work­ing memory

- Design for Cross-train­ing. Spa­tial and visu­al tasks, each with a num­ber of dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties and a sophis­ti­cat­ed back-end algorithms

- Think Exer­cise, more than Games: we are talk­ing about an Indi­vid­u­al­ized Pro­gram with max­i­mum Stretch­ing practice

- Ensure Com­pli­ance: Reward game at the end of the ses­sion, sup­ple­ment­ed with coach­ing for kids and met­rics for adults.

Ear­li­er in the day I had had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to inter­view Daniel Gopher, Pro­fes­sor of Cog­ni­tive Psy­chol­o­gy and Human Fac­tors Engi­neer­ing at the Tech­nion, on his cog­ni­tive train­ers for pilots and for bas­ket­ball play­ers. Pro­fes­sor Gopher insist­ed on the need for “cog­ni­tive fideli­ty” in any train­ing pro­gram or sim­u­la­tion, as a more impor­tant ele­ment than “phys­i­cal fideli­ty”. Will aim at hav­ing the inter­view pub­lished by Fri­day, so you can enjoy a very nice week­end read.

Alvaro