Computational intelligence and cognitive performance assessment games

In this paper, we present the idea that game design, player modeling, and procedural content generation may offer new methods for modern psychological assessment, allowing for daily cognitive assessment in ways previously unseen. We suggest that games often share properties with psychological tests and that the overlap between the two domains might allow for creating games that contain assessment elements and provide examples from the literature that already show this. While approaches like these are typically seen as adding noise to a particular instrument in a psychometric context, research in player modeling demonstrates that it is possible to extract reliable measures corresponding to psychological constructs from in-game behavior and performance. Given these observations, we suggest that the combination of game design, player modeling, and procedural content generation offers new opportunities for conducting psychometric testing with a higher frequency and a higher degree of personalization than has previously been possible. Finally, we describe how we are currently implementing the first version of this vision in the form of an application for mobile devices that will soon be used in upcoming user studies.

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