9 ms·
Reliably measuring IQ through commercial puzzle games
- payne92 11y agoIs there a link to the paper?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ingenter 11y agoFuck academic paywalls, here's a pdf. https://mega.nz/#!510ngJYY!S2_PGUIrprdnc5Byf5y1MNIbonm9-v3Y2zCmdsSMJ4k https://mega.nz/#!510ngJYY!S2_PGUIrprdnc5Byf5y1MNIbonm9-v3Y2...
- Paul_S 11y agoYou are a saint. I was curious what they meant by "commercial" video games. I was expecting real video games like Quake or Witcher but instead it's what you'd expect to be used to measure IQ - puzzle games, some of which mimic questions on regular IQ tests. Not as exciting as the abstract leads you to believe.
- vengadora 11y agoI haven't a credit card, i am a penniless person studying on a public university that does not teach (almost) anything good, and wants to become a game dev based on free software philosophy, currently researching about edutainment and... zomg... you pwn, thanks! really thanks! every article i want to read about this, is via payment only, so it is becoming really hard to research about this subject :( but today, you saved the day!!
- thegeomaster 11y agoThis just might make your life easier: when you encounter a paper you want to read, but it's behind a paywall, post a request to https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar (the instructions are in the sidebar, make sure to follow them closely to get a speedy reply). One of the kind souls there who have access to the article will give you the link.
- delecti 11y agoI don't know what specific university you're going to, but many university libraries have free access to journals for students. You should do some research on your school's library's website.
- kbutler 11y agoSad that we need to research how to get access to research. How much impediment to the progress of the arts and sciences should we allow copyright to impose?
- vengadora 11y agonow you mention it, i think my university has access to some scientific journals... but i think that only covers hinari and scielo... and i have to make a formality to get an institutional account
- jakobegger 11y agoFuck mega, for some reason they require flash to download a file? Doesn't sound very trustworthy.
- zuck9 11y agoUse a different browser.
- stuxnet79 11y agoUse Chrome. Best thing to do is to download MEGASync for Windows or Mac OS as then it makes everything straightforward.
- jakobegger 11y agoWelcome back to the days of "You need Internet Explorer 4 and please download this ActiveX control to use this site"...
- terminado 11y agoFuck yeah! You rock! (also, didn't need anything weird to download, it was a straight HTTPS transfer over 443 for me)
- ryanmarsh 11y agoWas thinking this knowledge could be used as a recruiting tool, then immediately this came to mind... "Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada..."
- reustle 11y agoI don't know if this is what you're referring to, but this is exactly what patio11 is working on now http://www.starfighters.io/ http://www.starfighters.io/
- DaCapoo 11y agoHe's referring to the (1984) movie "The Last Starfighter", in which an arcade game is used to recruit a fighter pilot. It's also where patio11 + ptacek got the name for that project. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/
- Uptrenda 11y agoThese academic pay walls really are a cancer to learning and human knowledge.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoIn proper scientific fields, authors post preprint PDFs on freely available sites like arXiv.
- jasode 11y agoWell, reading the PDF was anticlimactic. Why? Because page 2 of the PDF describes the 12 games that were used. They were games that test memorization, puzzle completion, and pattern matching. In other words, the "commercial video games" used in their research were "brain games" and not Pac-Man, Mario Bros, and Call of Duty, etc. If you've ever taken a real IQ test where the proxy shows you cards to match or pictures with "missing" data, the 12 video games they used are very similar in spirit. It's not surprising that there is high correlation between the scores of those particular types of video games and real IQ tests. However, that's not to say there is zero correlation between blockbuster video games like Call of Duty and IQ. Maybe another study will pursue that.
- alexvr 11y agoThanks for the warning. I was really hoping to see Halo or Quake or something, because in my experience practicing these games in a casual-competitive way, I hit a performance ceiling. In high school I played Halo nearly every day, and a bright friend of mine, who didn't even own the game, was a surprisingly good player for his limited experience. On a similar note, I once read that reaction time and IQ are correlated (not sure how strongly), which is interesting because you might expect motor functions like that to be orthogonal to higher-order cognitive abilities.
- ansible 11y agoOn a similar note, I once read that reaction time and IQ are correlated (not sure how strongly), which is interesting because you might expect motor functions like that to be orthogonal to higher-order cognitive abilities. Speed is good, in many contexts. Say you've two people, and person A has overall cognitive speed 25% greater than the other. That doesn't just help with Jeopardy!, it gives you 25% more time to think in normal conversations, on SAT tests, while playing video games, at work, etc. Even a 10% slower speed differential from a baseline human is a big, big disadvantage.
- foobar2020 11y agoReaction time is good in general, but rather useless in the traditional IQ tests, i.e. culture-neutral multiple choice pattern-based questions. If you are 25% faster than your neighbour it gives you the benefit of the additional 25% of the reaction time, not total answering time, which is usually much larger in the context of IQ tests. Or nearly any test, for that matter.
- tyrion 11y ago> Here we show, for the very first time, that commercial video games can be used to reliably measure individual differences in general intelligence (g). One hundred and eighty eight university undergraduates took part in the study. Is this a joke? reliably measure ? 188 students? So are you trying to tell me that if I could play Call of Duty with A. Einstein I would be humiliated despite him never having played a video game in his entire life?
- psycr 11y agoYou would do well to learn about effect size and p values. Your common sense guess at what might be reliable is incorrect, which means your doing a disservice to your own understanding of the world.
- stared 11y agoThey are already used for that purpose: "The largest human cognitive performance dataset reveals insights into the effects of lifestyle factors and aging" Daniel A. Sternberg, Kacey Ballard, Joseph L. Hardy, Benjamin Katz, P. Murali Doraiswamy and Michael Scanlon, Front. Hum. Neurosci., 20 June 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00292 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00292
- mohnishc 11y agoA year and a half back, when I was in the 10th grade, I did some similar research on the effects of video games on the cognitive skills of students. I specifically designed games for this research. I wanted to further this study to test commercially available video games, but due to lack of support and finance, I could not (I'm still in high school). You can go through the paper here if you want: http://www.emerginginvestigators.org/2015/01/gaming-cognitive-skills/ http://www.emerginginvestigators.org/2015/01/gaming-cognitiv... OR http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01665 http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01665 TL;DR; of the paper: I divided the class into two groups, one that played the video games and one that did not. Two tests were taken - one before the children were allowed to play games and another at the completion of one week. Children were made to play games for an hour daily. The results showed that gaming does improve cognitive skills. I was particularly surprised by the substantial improvement that it led to in scores. PS: Anyone who wants to take this further or maybe has ideas for implementing this, please feel free contact me. I would love to help you out on this.
- palguay 11y agoI am the founder of http://brainturk.com http://brainturk.com . I would like to talk to you on this . What's your email ?
- mohnishc 11y agoYou can send me a connection request on Linkedin (https://in.linkedin.com/in/mohnish7 https://in.linkedin.com/in/mohnish7) and once I accept it, you can check out my email address. I'm a bit skeptical about sharing personal data on public forums.
- kragen 11y agoMaybe a better summary of this paper would be "IQ tests presented on a computer screen produce scores highly correlated to IQ tests presented on paper," since they didn't use what you would normally call "video games."
- hyperion2010 11y agoOne addendum here is that you can use them to measure g, but as soon as you start trying to use them to improve g any value of g you measure using them will be incorrect due to learning effects and there is no reliable evidence that playing such games can improve g. Source: wrote my prelims on this.
- gaelow 11y agoreliably <> accurately Wow, some psychology professor who read Ender's Game (Probably watched it since, come on, psychology is science at its laziest and the timeframes match) decided to make a quick buck by publishing an online paywalled paper on the "discovery" "for the first time" that people give up signs of their intelligence when observed performing an activity that requires them to use it (which matches the description of an infinite number of activities...). Hey, I can reliably measure your intelligence by reading your comments on Hacker News. May I have your cash-money bucks, please? $_$ I have been working hard with hundreds of my students to prove it! For the first time ever! $_$ The fact is that you need specifically designed games for an accurate test. Most video games just won't make the cut. Even a combination of them: take the top 10 from steam. I dare anyone to accurately measure the IQ of their players just by looking at them them play in whatever lab environment they want. An those would be pretty boring. They would be in fact, tests.
- stuxnet79 11y agoPublish or perish mentality ... or ... good science hindered by a hyperbolic, misleading title. The former is cancerous but the latter can be easily rectified. I myself can't call it because I didn't click the link hoping I would get a TLDR in the comments.
- nevinera 11y agoWe can estimate a metric of intelligence by observing people performing tasks that require thought and problem solving? O.O