Grant+ideas

As per John's summary of our ideas (June 7, 2010): 1. If we include levels of interactivity (although it can be defined in diverse ways, and the level of feedback is one way to define it), it would be interesting to see how kids show different levels of flow (or engagement/immersion) in their learning when they are exposed to different levels of interactivity in games. Maybe we can see these differences through differences in eye-tracking patterns or fMRI? Rene and I have both been interested in the physiological experience of flow, with his article being the key one. He posits flow as a binding of attention networks-- the question to me is whether we would expect eye movement to be different during flow. Perhaps more efficient? What would this look like in terms of eye-tracking? And how would more efficient eye movement resulting from flow look different from more efficient eye movement due to experience. For example: Kirkorian and Anderson compared eye movement for infants and toddlers. They found that inexperienced viewers (very young) always return to the center of the screen as an orientation point, while experienced viewers anticipated accurately where the next important information would be. Imagine a character walking from screen left to screen right. As he moves of screen right, according to continuity editing we would expect him to appear screen left again to continue the motion. Experienced viewers knew that and their eyes waited screen left for the reappearance, whereas inexperienced viewers always oriented back to the center of the screen. So--- if we want to do a flow study and we assume that bound attentional networks will be highly efficient, we need some stimulus that has clear efficient and inefficient viewing patterns and we need to be able to control for experience. 2. A high level of Interactivity in games might be helpful in engaging kids for better learning experiences, but I am wondering if there is any possibility that too much immersion in games of high interactivity levels might harm kids in any way (e.g., early symptoms for potential game addiction or even ADHD). Considering that today's kdis are exposed to diverse interactive media in such early ages, (too much) multitasking or having hard time to focus on one activity have been considered to be serious issues. I am not sure if there is any way we can detect these early negative symptoms through eye-tracking or fMRI, but it would be pretty interesting to see. Just a thought. This is the cool thing about the article that Fran found-- it suggests that video game interactivity may be detrimental to learning to the extent that the moving graphics require more cognitive resources than static images. I'm also highly hesitant to label anything 'negative' because that has a connotation of relative correctness. A long time ago, one of my grad students pointed out that children view a very different form of television news than we older people did-- CNN has multiple streams of information on the screen, while I just had Walter Cronkite reading off a piece of paper (no video feed, no background images, no stock ticker, no baseball scores, etc). She questioned whether kids raised on such media will become more efficient users of information. Now, we are seeing the fruits of this. I recently read an article in the popular press that suggests that college students surf the web and Facebook during our lectures because our lectures move too slow for them. One could argue that being more efficient users of information is a positive thing, while others could argue the phenomenon is negative because they lack depth of thought. To me, this is an empirical question rather than a question of the correct way to process information. ... I wished I had a good sense of the (certainly rich) literature on   learning with/without feedback ... I'd be interested to integrate the    literature on feedback and its multiple components with the    "interactivity in games" concept from a cognitive perspective ....    (we recently submitted a scale of video game interactivity that works    quite well) .... just a thought ...  I'm not sure what your definition of feedback is here-- I'm assuming 'change resulting from interaction'? This article doesn't really speak to that; only to 'feedback-less' learning. I think that incorporating feedback is an important necessary step, but one that should probably come after we figure out how the working memory is being overwhelmed in process animations. Feedback may be wasted on players who can't even comprehend what is happening. I've yet to see levels of interaction manipulated for a grade school > population recently ...what if kids with differing levels of spatial > ability do respond differentially eye-scanning wise and fMRI-wise > when exposed to varying levels of interactivity? > Forgive the myriad of differences presented here...heat is rotting my > brain. I agree-- this is an important point. The key question is at what ages would we expect to see differences? Or maybe this is exploratory in that we need to find out what ages have differences? When do we expect spatial abilities to develop? Has anyone tried to isolate the window for this development? What might it look like in the developing brain? Know what would be really cool? Isolate the developmental window (either experimentally or via the literature), then do fMRI of pre-spatial developed brain and a spatial developed brain, along with eye-tracking. Then-- we could teach the pre-spatial brain efficient screen-scanning techniques, then fMRI it again! INTERESTING! I wonder if there is a link to the "learning with video > games" literature? Could levels of interactivity/feedback ("games as > animated interactive environment") be an interesting manipulation? > Just thinking how this research would fit in my research agenda This is all about learning with video games. The study Fran sent isolates a key rudimentary process that is necessary for understanding learning in interactive environments. If animations overwhelm the working memory in a simple tutorial, think of the implications for overwhelming the working memory in a game! Type in the content of your page here.