Using Games to Understand the Mind
Kelsey R. Allen, Franziska Brändle, Matthew Botvinick, Judith E. Fan, Samuel J. Gershman, Alison Gopnik, Thomas L. Griffiths, Joshua K. Hartshorne, Tobias U. Hauser, Mark K. Ho, Joshua R. de Leeuw, Wei Ji, Kou Murayama, Jonathan D. Nelson, Bas van Opheusden, H. Thomas Pouncy, Janet Rafner, Iyad Rahwan, Robb B. Rutledge, Jacob Sherson, Özgür Şimşek, Hugo J. Spiers, Christopher Summerfield, Mirko Thalmann, Natalia Vélez, Andrew J. Watrous, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Eric Schulz
Abstract
Board, card, or video games have been played by virtually every individual in the world population, with both children and adults participating. Games are popular because they are intuitive and fun. These distinctive qualities of games also make them ideal as a platform for studying the mind. By being intuitive, games provide a unique vantage point for understanding the inductive biases that support behavior in more complex, ecological settings than traditional lab experiments. By being fun, games allow researchers to study new questions in cognition such as the meaning of "play'' and intrinsic motivation, while also supporting more extensive and diverse data collection by attracting many more participants. We describe both the advantages and drawbacks of using games relative to standard lab-based experiments and lay out a set of recommendations on how to gain the most from using games to study cognition. We hope this article will lead to a wider use of games as experimental paradigms, elevating the ecological validity, scale, and robustness of research on the mind.