C. Shawn Green: Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science, University of Minnesota

Effect of action video games on perceptual skills

My Ph.D research focused on a variety of perceptual and decision making skills that are enhanced as a result of action video game experience. For a description of these projects as well as ongoing work, see my Ph.D advisor's webpage or check out my publications list.

Decision-making

One of the projects I'm currently working on examines human decision making and in particular, situations wherein humans are known to make severely suboptimal decisions. Much in the same way that the presence of perceptual illusions can lead to strong inferences regarding normal perceptual processing (i.e. – one can explore the assumptions and strategies that are used in creating percepts by examining situations where those assumptions are violated or those strategies lead to incorrect interpretations) decision making tasks where humans consistently make suboptimal choices offer an opportunity to examine the principles, policies, and purposes that underlie normal decision making. Rather than using the standard, somewhat boring tasks from the psychology and economics literatures though, we've developed a more interesting set of decision making tasks using a jet fighter "game" that we have programmed using the Virtools environment. There'll be more here (as well as Demos on the Demos page) as we finish experiments and get things written up.

Maximizing perceptual learning

Although the literature on perceptual learning has shown that humans can improve on virtually any perceptual task, these studies have also demonstrated a remarkable specificity of learning.  Improvements are observed only in the trained task, with little to no transfer of learning being observed even for very similar untrained tasks.  This specificity is a major impediment in the attempt to train or rehabilitate individuals, where the overarching goal is typically to increase the individual’s quality of life (and thus necessarily requires general learning). Interestingly, while there are many task characteristics that are known to influence the outcome of learning in the fields of social psychology, education, and economics, the effect of these same characteristics on perceptual learning has not been explored.  For example, the level of motivation and arousal engendered by a given task is known in the education literature to play a substantial role in determining the degree to which the task is learned.  However, no groups have systematically assessed the effect of arousal, motivation or other similar factors on low-level perceptual learning. As above, there'll be more here as we finish experiments!