Delogu Franco, Barnewold Madison, Meloni Carla, Toffalini Enrico, Zizi Antonello, Fanari Rachele
Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Communication, Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, MI, United States.
Department of Pedagogy, Psychology, Philosophy, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2020 Sep 24;11:551126. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.551126. eCollection 2020.
Morra is a 3,000-years-old hand game of prediction and numbers. The two players reveal their hand simultaneously, presenting a number of fingers between 1 and 5, while calling out a number between 2 and 10. Any player who successfully guesses the summation of fingers revealed by both players scores a point. While the game is extremely fast-paced, making it very difficult for players to achieve a conscious control of their game strategies, expert players regularly outperform non-experts, possibly with strategies residing out of conscious control. In this study, we used Morra as a naturalistic setting to investigate the necessity of attentive control in generation of sequence of items and the ability to proceduralize random number generation, which are both a crucial defensive strategy in Morra and a well-known empirical procedure to test the central executive capacity within the working memory model. We recorded the sequence of numbers generated by expert players in a Morra tournament in Sardinia (Italy) and by undergraduate students enrolled in a course-based research experience (CRE) course at Lawrence Technological University in the United States. Number sequences generated by non-expert and expert players both while playing Morra and in a random number generation task (RNGT) were compared in terms of randomness scores. Results indicate that expert players of Morra largely outperformed non-experts in the randomness scores only within Morra games, whereas in RNGT the two groups were very similar. Importantly, survey data acquired after the games indicate that expert players have very poor conscious recall of their number generation strategies used during the Morra game. Our results indicate that the ability of generating random sequences can be proceduralized and do not necessarily require attentive control. Results are discussed in the framework of the dual processing theory and its automatic-parallel-fast vs. controlled-sequential-slow polarities.
莫拉是一种有着3000年历史的关于预测和数字的手部游戏。两名玩家同时亮出他们的手，展示1到5根手指，同时喊出一个2到10之间的数字。任何成功猜出双方亮出手指总数的玩家得一分。虽然游戏节奏极快，玩家很难有意识地控制自己的游戏策略，但专家玩家通常比非专家表现得更好，可能是采用了超出意识控制的策略。在本研究中，我们以莫拉游戏为自然场景，来探究在生成项目序列时注意力控制的必要性以及将随机数生成程序化的能力，这两者既是莫拉游戏中至关重要的防御策略，也是测试工作记忆模型中中央执行能力的一个著名实证程序。我们记录了意大利撒丁岛一场莫拉锦标赛中专家玩家以及美国劳伦斯理工大学参加基于课程的研究体验（CRE）课程的本科生所生成的数字序列。比较了非专家和专家玩家在玩莫拉游戏时以及在随机数生成任务（RNGT）中生成的数字序列的随机性得分。结果表明，莫拉游戏的专家玩家仅在莫拉游戏中随机性得分大大超过非专家，而在随机数生成任务中两组非常相似。重要的是，游戏后获取的调查数据表明，专家玩家对他们在莫拉游戏中使用的数字生成策略的有意识回忆非常差。我们的结果表明，生成随机序列的能力可以程序化，不一定需要注意力控制。在双重加工理论及其自动 - 并行 - 快速与受控 - 序列 - 缓慢两极对立的框架下对结果进行了讨论。
