Call for short research proposals
Call for short research proposals to correlate survey questions with game-based psychological profiles.
The ScienceAtHome project has reached an agreement with DR to jointly conduct a massive citizen science project in connection with DR’s focus on 2018 as the year of science.
The ScienceAtHome team has developed a citizen science game, Skill Lab: Science Detective, enabling the (partial) mapping of a spectrum of cognitive and psychomotor indicators**, for the development of player cognitive mapping (of course, with their consent). In addition, we are gathering socio-demographic data such as age, gender, employment, education level, country of residence, and nationality. The sociodemographic data, however, is not mandatory and we are gathering it only for players who want to fill in their profiles on our website.
The project starts with a public calibration phase, currently running. This will provide the data to calibrate the underlying model linking individual combinations of features in the new games with classic psychological evaluation models and the cognitive traits of the player through a set of classic psychological tasks.
See www.dr.dk for publicly available information about the project including access to the calibration version of the game.
With the model in place, the psychological tasks (which are time-consuming) will be taken out from the game. ScienceAtHome and DR have then planned a major national event in Week 36, 2018,
(1-9/9) in which we will engage as many Danes as possible to participate in a national cognitive ability mapping project. The event will be promoted over a broad range of DR platforms.
The core motivation behind the project is the fact that with the advent of AI it is becoming increasingly important for us to understand ourselves better so we can create future tools and interfaces that will optimally harness the unique strengths of humans as well as machines. In addition, in a future where knowledge is power, we feel that it is important for a democratic society to ensure equal access to information, including information from the social sciences. We see any unbalance in knowledge as a fundamental roadblock for creating a future society with equal opportunities for everyone.
In addition to the game-based mapping of cognitive abilities, the week-36 participants will within the game be given the option to answer a range of questions (~20) posed by researchers in various fields who would be interested in pairing their research questions with individual cognitive abilities.
The program committee hereby invites short research proposals from researchers with specific research questions which could be related to the cognitive abilities listed below. The short proposal should be less than one page and describe the 2-5 closed-ended survey questions to be posed to the players, the research hypothesis and the methodology of data analysis along with the description of the team of researchers contributing to the proposal.
In terms of publication of results, the ScienceAtHome team aims to collect the results from the cognitive ability mapping effort and main findings of the question-based research into a single high-profile paper with all involved researchers as co-authors. After this, follow up papers with individual teams of researchers can then be pursued.
The short proposal and the CV of the main PI should be sent by email to Jacob Sherson (sherson@phys.au.dk) no later than 6th of August. Notification of the decision of the program committee will be given on the 10th of August.
Program committee
Jacob Sherson
Carlos Díaz
Carsten Bergenholtz
Ali Amidi
Michael Bang Petersen
Rajiv Basaiawmoit
** In particular, the games aim to address:
Fine Motor Skills
Hand-eye coordination
Reaction times
Selective visual attention
Spatial ability (perception in 2D)
Spatial ability (perception in 3D)
Spatial reasoning (mental rotation)
Visuospatial Working memory
Executive function: Monitoring
Executive function: Response inhibition
Executive function: prospective memory
Executive function: Planning
Visuospatial memory
The physico-mechanical reasoning of speed
Verbal (written) perception
Reading comprehension of simple instructions
Instruction compliance