Background

In his famous address “You can’t play 20 questions with nature and win”, Newell (1973) predicted that experimental psychology’s focus on falsifying theories of individual phenomena (e.g., subitizing, directed forgetting, etc.) would not lead to a unifying theory subsuming several (let alone all) of the phenomena. Instead of seeking to detect effects, and binary searching our way to the explananda of these phenomena, Newell argued psychologists should build predictive theories of behavior by modeling 1) the structure of the task environment (i.e., context), 2) the subjects’ own goals, and 3) the invariant structure of the subjects’ processing mechanisms. Newell concludes that psychology will only make real progress in understanding the mind by 1) targeting tasks that are complex enough to cover the space of naturalistic behavior, 2) developing models that can competently perform the task, and 3) generalizing such models to perform multiple complex tasks. For 1), Newell chose to study chess; we believe he would find video games an even more compelling paradigm (see Gobet, 2017).

This workshop will explore how video games may be exemplary “complex tasks” that can be leveraged to collect rich, fine-grained behavioral data in the context of known goals and a rich task environment that is amenable to building cognitive models that promise to explain diverse cognitive strategies and capacities. While this workshop is primarily focused on evaluating the argument for video games’ sufficiency as a platform for building general (and testable) theories of cognition, our speakers will also give examples of a diverse sample of video games, explain how these games engage cognition in context, and show how the rich behavioral data from games can be used to synthesize theories of cognition, and even to be used as interventions.

References

Gobet, (2017). Allen Newell’s Program of Research: The Video-Game Test. Topics in Cognitive Science. (9) 522–532. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/tops.12265.

Newell, A., (1973). You can’t play 20 questions with nature and win. Visual Information Processing. W. G. Chase (ed.) New York, NY: Academic Press.