Cognition and Games

As a facsimile of the real world, video games offer an incredible new opportunity for educating and communicating with a wide range of audiences.  The profusion of video games has been met with a rapidly growing research community dedicated to understanding this medium.  Researchers routinely study the effects of video game violence or other features on opinions and behavior, and games have been found to improve performance in real-world tasks like surgery or visual search.  In the MINDLab, we have begun several new studies looking at the interplay between video games and a variety of cognitive skills.  In one study, we are working with colleagues to examine individual differences in mental rotation ability and the ability to perform spatial navigation in a virtual maze.  In another study, we have been examining the effects of emotional state on cognitive performance (e.g., decision making, memory, risk taking) during a game-play session.  We are also in the process of constructing computational models of cognitive skills such as decision making and learning, which should enable us to gain a better understanding of the cognitive aspects of real-time game play.