Gray Wayne D
Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Top Cogn Sci. 2017 Apr;9(2):289-307. doi: 10.1111/tops.12260. Epub 2017 Mar 13.
Why games? How could anyone consider action games an experimental paradigm for Cognitive Science? In 1973, as one of three strategies he proposed for advancing Cognitive Science, Allen Newell exhorted us to "accept a single complex task and do all of it." More specifically, he told us that rather than taking an "experimental psychology as usual approach," we should "focus on a series of experimental and theoretical studies around a single complex task" so as to demonstrate that our theories of human cognition were powerful enough to explain "a genuine slab of human behavior" with the studies fitting into a detailed theoretical picture. Action games represent the type of experimental paradigm that Newell was advocating and the current state of programming expertise and laboratory equipment, along with the emergence of Big Data and naturally occurring datasets, provide the technologies and data needed to realize his vision. Action games enable us to escape from our field's regrettable focus on novice performance to develop theories that account for the full range of expertise through a twin focus on expertise sampling (across individuals) and longitudinal studies (within individuals) of simple and complex tasks.
为什么是游戏？怎么会有人将动作游戏视为认知科学的一种实验范式呢？1973年，作为他为推动认知科学发展而提出的三种策略之一，艾伦·纽厄尔劝诫我们要“接受一项单一的复杂任务并将其全部完成”。更具体地说，他告诉我们，不应采取“常规的实验心理学方法”，而应“围绕一项单一的复杂任务开展一系列实验和理论研究”，以便证明我们的人类认知理论足够强大，能够通过符合详细理论框架的研究来解释“一整块真实的人类行为”。动作游戏代表了纽厄尔所倡导的那种实验范式，而当前的编程专业知识和实验室设备状况，以及大数据和自然产生的数据集的出现，提供了实现他的设想所需的技术和数据。动作游戏使我们能够摆脱本领域对新手表现的令人遗憾的关注，通过对简单和复杂任务的专业技能抽样（跨个体）和纵向研究（个体内）这两个关注点，来发展能够解释全方位专业技能的理论。
