Abstract:

The school environment presents an extreme challenge to anyone with regard to attention abilities. Students must focus intently on a teacher’s words while filtering out the dynamics among 20 or more classmates — private conversations, dropped pencils, fidgeting, note-passing, and countless other distractions within and outside the classroom. They must then sort through the information they hear, organize and prioritize their thoughts, plan their responses, and perform the work assigned to them. Importantly, inattentive behaviours have been shown to predict lower academic achievements, not only during the childhood but they also persist into the adolescence and adulthood. Furthermore, attentive abilities have been reported to be more relevant than intelligence quotients and that intelligence and academic achievement are moderated by sustained attention. Traditionally, many tasks, such as the Dot Probe, Stroop and Go/no-go tasks have been used for assessing attention abilities but they are showing limits regarding the real behaviours in daily activities. Starting from these premises, we developed a contextualized serious game, which aims to assess behaviours related to attention abilities in accordance with the educational level. A total of 286 subjects performed a series of standard tasks (ST) related to attention (Dot Probe Task, Go/No-go Task and Stroop Test) and four serious games (SG), each one associated with a ST. Participants were divided into three groups attending to their level of education: high school studies (1, n=118), university studies (2, n=115) and post-graduate studies (3, n=53). Pearson correlations calculated for each ST and its related SG dependent variables showed statistically significant main relationships between variables. These results indicate differences among groups of participants depending on their level of education: Dot Probe Task – SG1 (Group 1) Correct answers r = .389** (p-value = .000), Latency time r = .728** (p-value = .000); Dot Probe Task – SG1 (Group 2) Correct answers r = .682** (p-value = .000), Latency time r = .770** (p-value = .000); Dot Probe Task – SG1 (Group 3) Latency time r = .679** (p-value = .000); Dot Probe Task – SG2 (Group 1) Latency time r = .723** (p-value = .000); Dot Probe Task – SG2 (Group 2) Correct answers r = .659** (p-value = .000), Latency time r = .823** (p-value = .000); Dot Probe Task – SG2 (Group 3) Correct answers r = .435** (p-value = .000), Latency time r = .474** (p-value = .000); Go/Nogo Task – SG3 (Group 2) Latency time r = .239** (p-value = .010); Stroop Test – SG4 (Group 1) Correct answers r = .206* (p-value = .025), Latency time r = .428** (p-value = .000); Stroop Test – SG4 (Group 3) Latency time r = .567** (p-value = .000). Our results showed initial evidence of the efficacy of serious games to assess attention abilities. However this study presents some limitations in terms of generalization to other population, as only healthy subjects, mostly young adults, participated in this study. Further studies should include people with cognitive impairments and young and elder healthy participants.

Keywords:

Attention abilities, education, learning, serious game, academic performance.