Hello, my name is Madison Klarkowski and I am pleased to present work on using functional
near infrared spectroscopy to assess cognitive activity during gameplay.
I'm presenting this work on behalf of my co-authors, Mickael Causse, Alban Dupres, Natalia del
Campo, Kellie Vella, and Daniel Johnson, from a range of affiliations.
Videogames are often heralded by the public, and in the media, as a cognitively undemanding
activity.
So, we wanted to know: how does mental effort and cognitive activity differ between gameplay
- and this?
That is, a type of activity specifically engineered to engage and stimulate human executive function
such as working memory and cognitive flexibility.
There are a number of tools we can employ to assess cognitive activity.
Most frequently in games user research, we see the uptake of technologies like electroencephalography
and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
The latter, fMRI, allows for greater spatial resolution than EEG by measuring brain activity
through the detection of changes in blood flow but is also expensive, susceptible to
noise, and largely requires the use of a logistically difficult scanner tunnel environment.
But we have a relative new kid on the block that also measures brain blood flow.
Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy, or Fnirs, allows insights into cognition through
measurement of cerebral haemodynamic changes - that is, brain blood flow - as detected by
changes in oxygenation concentration.
It is a comparatively new entry into brain activity measurement, but allows greater spatial
resolution and localised insights than other measures.
And it is typically a measure of activity in the prefrontal cortex which is a locality
of the brain that is often most interesting to us as player experience researchers.
The reason for this is the prefrontal cortex, or PFC, is chiefly responsible for executive
control.
And it can also be divided into three broad regions of interest: left, medial, and right.
It can be subdivided further, but we're just going to look at these regions today.
Each of these regions have associations with specific functions and processes, such as
memory, language, and emotion.
We also know that if we see increased haemodynamic activity in the PFC, this is indicative of
increased mental workload.
Currently, work has found that fNIRS can successfully distinguish between gameplay and rest.
However, distinguishing between levels of difficulty has proven more complex.
There also exists a dearth of comparisons between gameplay and known tasks that induce
and assess executive function.
To this end, we established three research objectives.
Objective 1 was to test whether fNIRS can reliably measure differences in PFC activity
associated with a videogame manipulation - in this instance, variations in game difficulty.
For Objective 2, we wanted to examine how PFC activation patterns compare between gameplay
and established executive function tests.
Finally, for Objective 3, we wanted to examine whether PFC activation patterns observed during
executive function tests are associated with activation patterns observed during videogame
play.
The game we selected was Anomaly: Warzone Earth, a reverse tower defense game for the
iPad in which players can select vehicles, deploy abilities, and guide their units through
hostile territory.
We chose this game because it offered clear delineations in difficulty, possessing easy,
medium, and hard difficulty levels, and because it was a commercial video game and so representative
of a game a player might enjoy in a naturalised context.
For our executive function tests, we selected three from the Cambridge Neuropsychological
Test Automated Battery.
These tests included the Attention Switching Task, or AST, which provides information about
participants' cognitive flexibility.
Our second test, the Spatial Working Memory (or SWM) is a test of retention and manipulation
of visuospatial information in the working memory.
The third, the One Touch Stockings of Cambridge, or OTS, is a test of spatial planning and
working memory.
We recruited 37 male participants with a mean age of approximately 21.
Our participants largely rated themselves as highly experienced videogame players.
Within the experiment, participants played an easy, medium, and hard version of
both the videogame and the three cognitive tests with counterbalanced condition order.
Now we turn to our results, considered in light of Objectives 1 through 3.
When considering Objective 1, we found clear evidence of an increase in PFC activity with
an increase in videogame difficulty.
From this, we suggest that more difficult levels represent greater cognitive demand
and corresponding mental effort.
We also suggest that this confirms the utility of fNIRS in the assessment of videogame difficulty.
When considering Objective 2, we found no general difference in cognitive activity between
difficult gameplay, difficult AST, and difficult OTS.
This suggests similar cognitive demand between these tasks and similar resulting mental effort.
Interestingly, the SWM actually induced the least cognitive activity.
It was also the fastest task to complete, so we suspect it may have been notably easier
than other tasks for our participants.
When inspecting specific regions of interest, across AST, SWM, and the difficult game condition,
we find increased cognitive activity in the left lateral region over the medial region.
This patterns suggests both problem solving and the use of working memory - specifically,
memory encoding, or the storage of information for later retrieval from long-term memory.
Turning to Objective 3, we find associations between the OTS and the game, and SWM and
the game, in the left lateral PFC.
This suggests that the cognitive tasks and games are drawing on the need to encode memories
and solve problems at similar levels of effort.
Further, in the right lateral PFC, we find associations between difficult AST and the
difficult game condition suggesting that the AST requires a similar level of memory retrieval
and sustained attention as playing the game at its most difficult.
Taken together, we find that cognitive activity during gameplay is comparable to cognitive
activity occurring during tasks explicitly intended to induce and test said activity.
Our results add to a body of empirical literature finding that videogames are not a mindless
leisure activity regardless of the popular conception.
The takeaways of our study is that we have found that fNIRS generates precise, valid,
and interpretable data for the measurement of the player experience.
We also find that mental effort expended during difficult videogame play is comparable to
effort expended during executive function tasks.
Finally, we find regional activity indicating spatial working memory, memory encoding and
retrieval, sustained attention, and problem solving processes are occurring during videogame
play.
In sum: playing videogames induces notable mental effort.
We also find that Fnirs an accurate and reliable measure of brain activity during gameplay,
and can distinguish between varying levels of difficulty situating it as another useful
psychophysiological measure for the assessment of player experiences.
Thank you so much!