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I examine how cognitive psychology can help explain and inform how we play games. Each episode looks at how a particular cognitive phenomenon affects game playing. All types of games are con...
How can some people remember scores of digits at a time or repeat back all the cards in a shuffled deck? Do they have exceptional memories?...
It’s time to dive in and finally have an in-depth discussion of working memory! Game References Carcassonne, River Valley Glassworks, Tetris...
It’s a bird, it’s a…yeah, it is a plane! Oh, and also a Tower? We are back with a cognalysis of two games, Sky Team, fresh off its Spiel des...
As humans, we can think about our own thinking. This is referred to as metacognition, and can provide great insight into game playing and li...
This episode considers how best to learn and teach games. Are there particular techniques that enables people to learn games more quickly an...
When processing information, humans use both the information coming through our senses and previously stored knowledge. This is referred to...
Show Notes When playing games, we find it useful to consider what other players know, and how that affects game play. Psychologists study th...
I ruminate on playing games online and how that relates to both game and interface design, as well as how humans experience emotion. This ha...
In talking about a game, we almost always make references to past games in order to describe or teach the new game. What does cognitive psyc...
What happens, cognitively speaking, as we move from novice to expert in a game? The episode examines changes in memory and strategy as peopl...
If you are an experienced gamer, you have seen that you can pick up a new game much more quickly than someone who doesn’t have as much gamin...
Multi-tasking happens a lot. We’re in a meeting, we email. We watch TV, we text. And to the chagrin of many, we play a game with our friends...
We examine the concept of levels of processing in this episode, that if you process an experience more deeply, you will remember it better....
Wingspan is a hot new boardgame that’s rocketing up the boardgamegeek’s rating chart. In this episode we take a look at some explanations of...
Game players often get stuck, either not seeing how to properly use an object in the game or perhaps persisting in an inefficient strategy....
Big changes happen in memory and knowledge as a person goes from beginner to expert. What does this entail for playing games? We take a clos...
How do we figure out how much something should cost or what the value of a thing should be? One decision-making heuristic process for this i...
I’m joined again by the resident developmental psychologist, where we talk about scaffolding, a learning technique where help and assistance...
I take a dive into Decrypto, comparing how clues are given in it versus in Codenames. Both the similarities and differences shed light into...
We are constantly explaining to ourselves why events happen. When those explanations involve linking the outcome of an event with our respon...
The representativeness heuristic is another rule-of-thumb that we use when we need to make a decision. We apply it when we decide an event i...
Virtual reality adds new dimensions to games. Psychology informs us of the issues on what goes on in a virtual environment. Join the discuss...
Some people have the idea that memory is like a tape recorder: if you remember it, that’s the way it happened. But, the data show that our m...
There are a number of heuristics that people use when they make decisions. In this episode, we discuss the availability heuristic and how we...
What might a cognitive psychologist say about game design? We discuss some of the issues Don Norman raised in his classic book The Design of...
This episode contains a deep dive into the cognitive ins and outs of the Playstation 4 game Horizon Zero Dawn. Much of the analysis, though,...
Cognitive psychologists make a lot of distinctions with different types of memory. In this episode I provide an overview of the various ways...
Many of our memories are structured around stories. They are a very powerful device, that allow us to remember and experience more than what...
Kids can learn a lot by playing games. In this episode I talk with Dr. Jennifer Blessing about the skills that children learn by playing gam...
Games can be thought of as solving one big problem: How do I win? Cognitive psychologists think about problem solving in terms of a search p...
One constraint that everyone has is working memory capacity. Or in other words, how many things you can remember at any one point in time. W...
I consider the popular board game Pandemic from a number of different angles. What makes it an interesting game, cognitively speaking? I tou...
Humans do not always make the most optimal decisions. We are limited by our cognitive resources. We usually make decisions, even in playing...
For about as long as there have been computers, there have been computer programs that play games. This episode considers some of the histor...
You need to have focused attention while playing games. If you don’t, you might miss a critical move in a board game, or totally miss that o...
Visual memory has a different character than verbal memory. This episode examines the nature of our visual memory, and how it is used in suc...
How verbal items are stored in long term affect how they are retrieved. This in turn affects how we play a fair number of games, as they req...