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

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