gamification of paired-associates learning task

[Levan Bokeria]

Hello,

I have a paired-associates task using 16 different birds and 3 Christmas toy stimuli. 3 of the birds are associated with the Christmas toys, and the rest are not. The birds are very similar, so they are perceptually tough to discriminate.

I use a trial-and-error learning approach, where participants just guess the correct association, get feedback, and move to the next trial. I need the participants to learn the associations very well, and piloting shows that people get bored very quickly or sometimes even loose temper.

What general strategies would you recommend to make the task more engaging? To "gamify" it in some way? 

Some preliminary thoughts:

• Playing positive/negative sounds during feedback.
• Keep an ongoing performance score for each paired-associated displayed on the screen.
  
• Encouraging remarks during the breaks.
  

Thank you!

Levan Bokeria

[Josh de Leeuw]

Hi Levan,

Is the single stimulus trial-and-error approach crucial for the design of the experiment? One thing that might be more engaging is to present an array of stimuli and have participants guess which bird has the toy. This might feel a little bit more like a puzzle to solve and less like random guessing.

Josh

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[Levan Bokeria]

Thank you Josh!

We'd like to avoid showing all the birds on the screen at the same time. Right now, I show a toy and then 2 birds, and ask the participants which bird is associated with the toy. Feedback tells them if they were correct, and what toy the other bird was associated with as well. 

I guess we could show them 3 birds at a time. 

Best,

Levan

[Becky Gilbert]

Bumping this up! 

I know this post is asking about a specific task, but I think a lot of researchers would benefit from advice and examples of how to make a standard/boring psych task into something more engaging and fun. I hoping that others will chime in with some suggestions. 

And here are two websites with examples of gamified tasks:

http://gameswithwords.org/quizzes

https://www.themusiclab.org/

Becky

[Joshua Hartshorne]

Hi Levan,

If people are saying the task is too boring, you probably want to think of a different task that gets at the same thing you want.

I like the idea of thinking about how to make the task a puzzle-solving task. Could you make the birds a clue to something (like where the toy is going to show up)? So I'm thinking more of an SRT task, where the goal is to press a key indicating which toy it is. But you see the bird in advance. Maybe that's not the right kind of learning for you, but you get the idea. 

A surprisingly effective method is to play a lot of video games and see if you can find any that involve the behavior you are interested in. And then you get to play video games and claim you are working!

Joshua K Hartshorne

Assistant Professor

Boston College

[Levan Bokeria]

Thank you Becky and Joshua!

I see the tasks in the Games with Words and the Music Lab involve telling the participants something about themselves. That seems to be a good intrinsic motivation. I'll try to think of something along those lines.

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