2 research outputs found
Cognitive Abilities in the Wild: Population-scale game-based cognitive assessment
Psychology and the social sciences are undergoing a revolution: It has become
increasingly clear that traditional lab-based experiments fail to capture the
full range of differences in cognitive abilities and behaviours across the
general population. Some progress has been made toward devising measures that
can be applied at scale across individuals and populations. What has been
missing is a broad battery of validated tasks that can be easily deployed, used
across different age ranges and social backgrounds, and employed in practical,
clinical, and research contexts. Here, we present Skill Lab, a game-based
approach allowing the efficient assessment of a suite of cognitive abilities.
Skill Lab has been validated outside the lab in a crowdsourced population-size
sample recruited in collaboration with the Danish Broadcast Company (Danmarks
Radio, DR). Our game-based measures are five times faster to complete than the
equivalent traditional measures and replicate previous findings on the decline
of cognitive abilities with age in a large population sample. Furthermore, by
combining the game data with an in-game survey, we demonstrate that this unique
dataset has implication for key questions in social science, challenging the
Jack-of-all-Trades theory of entrepreneurship and provide evidence for risk
preference being independent of executive functioning.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, and 2 table