Articles:Review on psychophysiological methods in game research

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Contents

Psychophysiological Research

using physiological signals to study psychological phenomena

Pros

  • physiological processes measured are mostly involuntary.
  • not contaminated by
    1. participant answering style
    2. social desirability
    3. interpretations of questionnaire
    4. item wording
    5. limits of participant memory
    6. observer bias.
  • measurements can be recorded automatically and continuously (in real-time), without disturbing the participant's natural behavior.
  • sensitivity of the psychophysiological method: measures are sensitive enough to pick up responses smaller than what the human eye can detect.
  • With triangulation there is great accuracy

Cons

  • data acquisition devices are typically expensive
  • needs personnel training
  • requires device maintenance
  • considerably more set up time compared to something like questionnaire.

Research Challenges

"The practical challenge is to identify research questions that can be answered even when the game is complex and the psychological processes numerous, and then to create an experimental design with the proper and necessary controls so that no confounding variables will affect the results (cf. e.g. [43])."

"If the game used in an experiment is not extremely simple and as such easily controllable, the phenomenon of interest must be very strong or the sample size large enough that the reactions of interest are not confounded among noise. Statisticians advise [19] that a sample size of at least 28 is needed to reliably detect a large effect size, even when the assumptions of the population are met—and they rarely are."


Valence / Arousal

EMG

can be used for assessing positive and negative emotional valence

Benefits compared to coding from a video
  • automation
  • objectivity (no observer biases)
  • temporal precision (milliseconds)
  • detection of even minuscule responses
Noise
  • Technical: bad contact between electrode and skin
  • Muscle activity: speaking and other social communication
  • Ambient noise: generated by electromagnetic devices such as computers, force plates, power lines etc. (From another paper)

EDA Electrodermal activity (EDA) or skin conductance

associated with emotional arousal

pro
  • EDA is less sensitive to noise
  • less ambiguous than facial muscle and heart activity.
con

Electrodermal responses are slow (delay of one to four seconds), but in general,

Attention

EEG

  • provides data about the brain’s electrical activity
  • millisecond accuracy
  • associated with drowsiness
  • vigilant attention
  • inactivity in the brain regions
  • used to study the processing of visual emotional stimuli.

The signal is examined for event-related potentials (ERP) evoked by specific events, or for changes in the power of different frequency bands. use of EEG in game research has been sparse

Other stuff

  • cortisol levels from participant saliva to investigate participant stress
  • measuring respiration for studying emotions or attention
  • providing control data when measuring cardiac activity
  • using eye gaze tracking and pupil size measurements for investigating arousal, cognitive effort, or attention level and its direction
  • examining brain activity with magnetoencephalography (MEG) or functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) * body movement and position (measured by acceleration sensors or position cameras) might be associated with attention, interest, and emotions.

References/Suggested Reading

suggests reading Handbook of Psychophysiology

Mandryk, R. (2008). Physiological measures for game evaluation. In: K. Isbister and N. Schaffer (Eds.), Game Usability: Advancing the player experience. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Ekman, I., Chanel, G., Kivikangas, J.M., Salminen, M., Järvelä, S., & Ravaja, N. (2010). Psychophysiological methods for game experience research - Directions for assessing social experience. Manuscript submitted for publication.

EMG stuff

Bradley, M.M. (2000). Emotion and motivation. In J. T. Cacioppo, L. G. Tassinary & G. G. Berntson (Eds.), Handbook of psychophysiology (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lang, P. J., Greenwald, M. K., Bradley, M. M., & Hamm, A. O. (1993). Looking at pictures: Affective, facial, visceral, and behavioral reactions. Psychophysiology, 30, 261-273.

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