Special Coverage

An Effective Gamification of the Stop-Signal Task: Two Controlled Laboratory Experiments (161)

Maximilian Friehs (Trier University/University College Dublin), Martin Dechant and Sarah Vedress (University of Saskatchewan), Christian Frings (Trier University), Regan Mandryk (University of Saskatchewan)

Summary by Jonathan Caballero, Digital Content Associate Editor

This recap is part of a special series of session summaries from the Psychonomic Society's 61st Annual Meeting. To read the rest of the series, click here.

We Don't Have To Bore Participants

Maximilian Friehs, along with his team, presented an insightful way to make a well-established but not so engaging (*cough cough* boring) task more enjoyable through gamification.

Have you ever been a newcomer to a group where you and someone else share names? Whenever someone says your name, you turn toward the speaker, only to find out that they were not calling you. As time passes, it gets easier to know when to attend. Some people are more likely to address you or your namesake, and you can tell them apart by their voices. This type of situation requires selectively inhibiting learned responses. 

The Stop-Signal Task measures response inhibition. In this task, arrows tell you whether to press the left or right arrow key. If the color changes (stop-signal), you do nothing. The screenshot below shows the stimuli. You repeatedly do this task for around 20 minutes…

Twenty minutes! Unsurprisingly, participants do not find this task very engaging.

But what if there was a way to make this task more enjoyable? 

Friehs and his team adapted the task into the Stop-Signal Game to explore this idea. Instead of arrows, you play a game where you follow a fairy’s instructions (the arrows) unless you discover that she’s not a fairy but a witch (the stop-signal). The screenshot of the game is below, and the video is here. 

Was the game as effective at measuring selective inhibition as the Stop-Signal task? Yes. There were no differences in performance, and participants found the game more enjoyable. 

A more engaging task can be useful when studying response inhibition in populations who have a hard time focusing for long periods, and why not, also for letting your participants enjoy more while you collect useful data!