Abstract:
Recent behavioural research on autism has highlighted the importance
of motivational set and behavioural context in establishing cognitive
strategy and determining performance: for instance, the autistic
impairment on the Wisconsin Card Sort disappears when the cards are
presented by a computer instead of a human, and the autistic impairment
at perception of global structure in a scene disappears in the context
of explicit instructions to look for the global-level target pattern.
The controlled yet active and engaging environment of a video game
provides a natural opportunity to examine autistic perceptual, attentional,
executive, and social cognitive skills in a context conducive to their
expression, and one in which the scientific requirement of experimental
control and reproducibility does not translate to the repetition and tedium
of most psychological experiments.  Experiments are embedded in a game that
captures and maintains subjects' interest, transparently collecting
behavioural data and synchronising with physiological recording hardware
as the subject plays.  The practical advantages of such an engaging and
ecologically valid format over the usual repetitive blocks of trials are
legion.  Indeed, varying levels and demands of attentional shifting and
multimodal integration are natural in the context of video game play, and
psychophysical measures such as dot motion coherence and embedded figures
are easily implemented as, for example, the movement of a star field on a
view screen and the detection of an adversary in a cluttered environment.
In addition, the strategic and adversarial nature of a video game carries
natural opportunities to explore higher-level cognitive measures such as
comprehension of game-related narratives and perception of a computer-
generated adversary's emotional cues. The video game consists of core
software for event logging and real-time synchronisation, a main game
themed around the construction of a space colony, and a collection of
mini-games each of which allows the player to collect resources for the
colony and to defend the colony from enemies or hazards.  Each mini-game
has its own plot and its own set of embedded experiments; design and
development efforts therefore admit a degree of parallelism.  On completion
of prototyping and initial data collection, the video game will be open-
source and the experimental data that it collects will be public to the
autism research community.