philoscience

Hi!

I'm a post-doc working with cognitive training and neuroplasticity, and a longtime fan of your labs work. I have two questions. First, what is your groups response to recent evidence that common "active controls" used in studies of videogames (typically the sims or tetris) elicit differential expectations for improvement, leading to motivation/demand characteristic confounds? Have you tried measuring participants specific expectations to improve on each tested measure?

Second, i'm working a lot with meta-cognition and am considering a study on vision, meta-cognition, and gaming. Have you conducted any research in this area, for example using the meta-d' methodology? If so i'd love to know how this went so I can plan my own study around that.

Bonus question: have you examined differences between playing something like call of duty offline vs online (multiplayer)? From the perspective of social cognition and joint attention I think this would be an extremely interesting contrast, and would perhaps control more directly for the issue mentioned in question 1.

Thanks. I find some of Daphne's latest work trying to describe a computational model underlying those speed-accuracy improvements to be particularly fascinating. Does she have any future plans in this area?

Thanks for your response! I'm at the scanner now but will PM you later today about metacognition and gaming.