Playing along for global research
The games may seem a bit like Candy Crush. Players must guess if there are more rubies or more diamonds on the screen; more pink aliens or blue ones; and use clues to determine which of two cows, brown or white, will yield more milk. But these seemingly simple games on a new app called Brain Explorer are helping neuroscientists gather data from around the world.
The app is part of a research project being conducted at the Max Planck UCL (University College London) Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. The research aims to establish links between brain development and mental health.
Treasure Hunt (the one with rubies and diamonds) investigates information-gathering. It indicates “how impulsive you are when making decisions,” says British neuroscientist Tobias Hauser, 37, who leads the research team with post-graduate research fellow Vasilisa Skvortsova, 36. “We know that noradrenaline and serotonin are critical for this process, and this game provides a window into these neurotransmitter functions.”
Space
Observer (the pink and blue aliens) investigates metacognition, or insight into one’s behaviour. Are you someone who knows very well when you made a wrong decision or do you find it difficult to judge how well you did? The cows game and a somewhatlinked pirates game (you must learn how to avoid losing the milk you have gathered) are particularly helpful in studying the learning process, because they track how differently we learn from reward and punishment, which are based on different neural mechanisms.
The games are followed by brief questionnaires on the screen, which ask users about their levels of confidence in a decision, and their reasons for arriving at them. Researchers and players can then see how well their confidence aligns with their objective performance. “How individuals learn in changing and uncertain environments, which strategy they choose, is related to various personality measures such as impulsivity,” Skvortsova says.
The Brain Explorer project, funded by grants from the Royal Society and Wellcome Trust, Jacobs Foundation and the Medical Research Foundation, was launched in 2019; the app was launched in December. There are five games on the app, all designed by Hauser’s team along with the app development company THKP, LLC. Players around the world have so far made a combined 1-million-plus game choices, helping Hauser and Skvortsova’s team collect data from across countries, ethnicities and age groups.
“Most brain research studies are limited in their sample size and thus the generalisability of the findings,” says Hauser. The app, however, has turned this into a kind of citizen science project.