Citizen Science, Gamification, and Virtual Reality for Cognitive Research

Introduction This workshop discusses three distinct but related topics. The first topic is citizen science which involves volunteers all around the world generating data to address scientific problems and recently led to breakthroughs in the natural sciences. Citizen science typically involves volunteers playing online games while unknowingly solving real scientific problems. This approach can benefit cognitive research either indirecty – if volunteers implicitly solve computationally hard research problems disguised behind a game – or it benefits researchers directly – if players do experimental tasks, with the key benefit that online games are easily accessible for a diverse international subject pool. Also, the data from existing citizen science projects provide insights for cognitive scientists (e.g., one citizen science project involved classification of galaxies). Although citizen science data is limited with respect to precise experimental control, its benefits are worth discussing. Our second topic is gamification, which citizen science often relies on. Gamification, in general, involves adding gamelike features to a task and could involve, for example, adding levels, points, or virtual characters to an experimental task. Gamified tasks are typically motivating for participants. While citizen science often uses gamification, also traditional laboratory studies can be supplemented with game-like elements and use technology from the gaming industry. Our third topic is virtual reality (VR). This technology developed by the gaming industry enables players, equipped with a headset, to experience a controlled 3-dimensional environment that emulates being in the middle of a 3D scenario. Virtual reality typically causes subjective immersion by simulating a naturalistic experience of interacting with the world, while simultaneously offering full experimental control about the environmental structure and interactions. The link between (large-scale online) citizen science and (smaller-scale lab-based) VR research lies in that usually both approaches use gamification. How can cognitive scientists use gamification and virtual reality environments for their research?