MoCapSuite | Domain-specific video-game play as training for decision making

<h3>Domain-specific video-game play as training for decision making</h3>
<strong>Lucy Parrington, Clare MacMahon and Lisa Wise</strong>

Decision-making is a key perceptual-cognitive skill in many complex tasks and domains of functioning. Decision-making in team sports can be used as a proxy for decision-making in other time-constrained and pressure based tasks involving goal-oriented, team-based behaviour. Sport-specific video-based training is often used as deliberate practice by team sports coaches. When used with feedback and error-correction, video-based decision training has been shown to improve decision making accuracy (<a href=”http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/375677 ” target=”_blank”>Lorains, Ball, & MacMahon, 2013</a>). It can be time-consuming and resource intensive to produce individualised video-based training, but it is plausible that off-the-shelf sport-specific video game play may help improve decision-making ability through the incidental development of tactical knowledge, flexibility and creativity. In this study, we explore whether brief participation in a domain-specific video game can improve decision making performance in a video-based decision making task in the same domain. While preliminary data from these studies provide some support for the idea that video-game play can improve the speed of decision-making, a quantitative analysis of the accuracy of decision-making is quite difficult to implement and is required for analysis of whether domain-specific video game play is beneficial to domain-specific decisions. While qualitative visual inspection of data may prove to be most informative for domain experts, we are considering a number of candidate quantitative measures of accuracy in terms of their utility both in a research context and in practice.