ONR Research Quantifying Video Game Playing and Visual Attention
Posted by jasonwong in attention, perception on January 27th, 2010
“We have discovered that video game players perform 10 to 20 percent higher in terms of perceptual and cognitive ability than normal people that are non-game players,” said Ray Perez, a program officer at the ONR’s warfighter performance department…”
(Researchers Examine Video Gaming’s Benefits from the American Forces Press Service)
Ever since Green & Bavlier’s (2003) paper in Nature, cognitive scientists have known that playing video games increases one’s performance in basic visual attention tasks. This result has been replicated, extended and restricted (only first-person shooter games lead to this effect and not games like Tetris), and it is good to see these results being applied. Many university laboratories have been working on applications, but now with funding from the Office of Naval Research, actual data has been collected with a focus on practical applications. Many times in my own presentations, I say that the new generation of sailors and soldiers are better because of their video game experience, and now I have practical data I can use as evidence. I look forward to seeing new research in this field and hopefully conducting some of my own.
A note: Ray Perez is essentially a funding officer – he has a PhD and understands the research, but he mostly controls the purse strings and gives money out to universities, industry, and government research labs (such as the one I work for) to do the work. It is disappointing that the article describing this research seems to attribute all the work to Dr. Perez, which is incorrect. He certainly made the research possible with ideas and (most importantly) money, but another organization carried out the work and should be credited in the article.
Neuroscientists (and friends of mine) make Engadget
Posted by jasonwong in neuroscience, training on January 21st, 2010
Taken fully from Engadget:
Study shows that better gamers have bigger brains, are better learners
While we can’t say for sure that videogames, as your grandmother insists, do indeed rot your brain, thanks to research conducted at a variety of Universities around the States we know that better gamers tend to have more gray matter than others — at least in certain areas. Kirk Erickson, Ann Graybiel, Arthur Kramer, and Walter Boot worked together to form a study in which 39 participants’ brains were scanned before those subjects were asked to play a game called Space Fortress (which looks a little like an Atari-era Geometry Wars). Players with larger nucleus accumbens did better learning the game early on, while those with larger caudate nucleus and putamen did better at playing with distractions. There was no sign that playing games actually increased the size of those areas of the brains, meaning some people are just born with a Power Glove on — and that it’s only a matter of time before MRIs replace aptitude tests.
Congrats to Kirk, Ann, Art, and Wally! You’ve hit the big time. 
The science of smell, memories, and flavor
Posted by jasonwong in neuroscience on January 16th, 2010
I am a regular listener of The Splendid Table, an NPR food show. It always makes me hungry and is much better than how Saturday Night Live’s Delicious Dish makes it seem (though Delicious Dish is hilarous).
Anyway, I was surprised but pleased to hear that the first interview of the January 16, 2010 show is neuroscientist Dr. Rachel Herz at Brown University. She has published a book called The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell and gave a very good interview about how our sense of smell is tied directly into emotion and memory centers of the brain, and how scent and taste combine to create flavor.
The interview is definitely worth listening to. Go to the episode listing and click on “01:00 – 07:36 The Scent of Desire” to listen, or you can try this direct link, which may or may not work.
Enjoy, and try not to get too hungry when she starts talking about steak.
Google’s Flight Information: Wild Guesses, not Actual Data
Posted by jasonwong in bad design, data visualization on December 28th, 2009
Google is useful for all kinds of things: certain information typed in a search box will bring up the information automatically. For example, “weather 02841″ will bring up the weather for the Newport, RI zip code. Additionally, typing in “UA 628″ or “DL 1064″ will bring up flight information for the United Airlines or Delta Airlines flight. One issue with this, though. The site that Google uses to pull up flight times in flightstats.com, which is not ideal for this task.
Let me explain with a concrete example. I was flying back from San Francisco to Providence on Saturday, December 19: the day of record snow (20 inches) in Washington, DC due to a blizzard all up and down the East Coast. Thankfully, I was routed through Atlanta (no snow), but things were messy enough that day that I was worried about being late.
My flight was to leave at 6 AM from San Francisco, but we hadn’t boarded at 5:45 AM yet. The gate said no change, but putting “DL 1064″ into Google brought up these results:
Delayed by 3 hours?! Instead of leaving at 6 AM, we’re leaving at 9 AM?! What? And then I noticed the words “ESTIMATED DEPARTURE” and decided to pull up the Delta site. Sorry for the poor resolution:
However, you can kind of squint and see that the flight was scheduled for an “ON TIME” departure. Turns out that we left maybe 15 minutes late.
The lesson here? The information that Google usually pulls up can be trusted. It’s flight information cannot, because it pulls Estimated Times from flightstats.com instead of current data. In this case, Google has failed to anticipate the information users want (actual data, not wild guesses), and that makes this a human factors error.
Google Tech Talk Summary and Pictures
To sum up: my Google Tech Talk went extremely went. The talk was part of the User Experience Brownbag series, so my audience of at least fifty people (pretty much a full room complete with four sites that teleconferenced in) was at least familiar with the topic area I spoke on.
The talk itself went wonderfully. I felt like I got into “the zone” of presenting that enabled me to speak smoothly, make eye contact, and be funny, informative, and interesting all at the same time. Both Ricardo, my host at Google, and Alden, the colleague I am on traveling on business with, also said the talk went well. I had a few people ask questions, and I thought they were intelligent.
As a company to work for, Google has rocketed to the top of my list. The exciting atmosphere, beautiful campus, ample resources, free food and drink, and all the perks are absolutely incredible. It is not a matter of whether I want a job at Google, but it’s a matter of whether I can get a job at Google. It’s all of the dot-com excesses that Silicon Valley is famous for, but well-managed and unlikely to implode anytime soon.
I hope to get a copy of the video soon (they have people whose job it is to do this kind of recording). However, the video needs to be processed, which may not happen until January because of the Christmas holiday and everyone taking vacation. As soon as it’s ready, though, I hope to help Google get it up on YouTube.
For now, many thanks to Ricardo for giving me this amazing opportunity to speak along with showing me around campus and talking about Google. Ricardo was the ultimate Google host!
Now, for pictures. Click on the thumbnails to see the full view.
Across the street shot of one of the main Google buildings.
A small part of the main Google campus, nicely landscaped. There is so much more than what this picture shows.
Another part of the Google campus, with the building primarily used for the Google Maps team.
Right outside of the Android development building – the Android logo with the three pastries the software releases have been named after – donut, cupcake, and eclair.
It was suggested that I stick my head through the donut hole for a picture. Yeah, that’s not ridiculous.
Inside the Android building, a big metal sculpture of the Predator from the movies. Next to me is Ricardo, my host at Google and good friend from George Mason University.
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