Spaceship Shenanigans

Summary

This game resembles the arcade game Missile Command. Tests focus on the Posner paradigm, distribution and shifting of attention, and the effect of multimodal (auditory and visual) stimuli.

Premise

The colony is in need of raw material resources. You are in control of the colony's Resource Gatherer. Use its tractor beam to collect as many resources as possible.

Objective

Collect as many resources as possible.

Characters

Colony Resource Gatherer

Resource/Ore:

Gameplay

The game consists 2 phases.

Gathering Phase focuses on the Posner paradigm.

Phases

Gathering Phase

Player

The player controls the Resource Collector, at the bottom-center of the screen, floating somewhere in space. This can rotate left and right. The Resource Collector is capable of firing a tractor beam. The player presses the Up-arrow key to fire the tractor beam.

Resource Detection System

Display a large, 10 hz (50% duty cycle) flashing arrow at the bottom of the screen, under the location that the stimulus will appear. The arrow appears either 100 ms (one flash) or 800 ms (eight flashes) prior to the materialization of the cargo and remains until the cargo materializes.

Not "under" the location, but rather at the bottom centre of the display (i.e. on top of the resource collector) pointing to the location. A purely symbolic cue will always appear in the same location on the display, that is, the location of the cue will bear no relation at all to the location of the target. If the SPATIAL *location* of the arrow rather than (or even in addition to) the SYMBOLIC *direction* of the arrowhead signifies the expected location of the cargo, then the arrow becomes a mixture of symbolic and spatial cueing. We want either a purely symbolic cue or a purely spatial cue. If you want to do a purely spatial cue, you could just flash something in the location at which the cargo is expected to appear. That might be simpler for the game play.

The resource detection system is fallible. 20% of the time, it indicates an invalid alert. (TODO: determine position of invalid warning)

This aspect of the task combines a variation of a centrally cued Posner attention paradigm (testing effects of cue validity and cue-target onset asynchrony) (Posner et al. 1987).

Starfield Passive Stimulus

The background of space is cluttered with stars.

Prior to the cue-target appearing, random stars blink/sparkle at 10 blinks/sparkles per second. (TODO: Determine distance/distribution)

Resource Stimulus

Following the resource detection alert, a resource will appear on the screen. At this time, the player will have control to rotate and activate the tractor beam. The first button pressed will be considered the reaction. (TODO: Determine random resource distribution)

The resource will slowly lose point value over time, disappearing over the duration of 6000 ms. A subtle particle affect will convey the resource as disintigrating. Once the tractor beam has been actived or the duration has elapsed, the player will no longer be able to move.

Unimodal vs. Multimodal Phase

An system activates a stimulus in one of three different conditions of sensory modality:

Unisensory Visual

Multisensory Audiovisual

The arrow is accompanied by a klaxon (100 hz square wave modulated at 10 hz in synchrony with the arrow).

Unisensory Auditory

The klaxon alone.

If we were to go to two quadrants instead of four (i.e., placing the base at the bottom of the display instead of in the centre), we could perhaps use a monaural (left or right) klaxon to give some directional information, akin to the valid or invalid direction cue that's given by the arrow.

Would it be better to remove directional specificity from the test altogether to focus strictly on the multi-modal aspect?

I have thought about this, and on reflection, we can go with the plain, non-directional klaxon. It seems useful to "kill two birds with one stone," as it were, in getting both a Posner attention-shifting paradigm and a unimodal-multimodal paradigm out of the same single task, if we can pack both in.

This aspect of the task is a test of multimodal (audiovisual) integration. (Senkowski, Molholm, Gomez-Ramirez, Foxe)(auditory_visual_integration_2006.pdf)

Scoring

Cash is awarded for each resource collected. (The cash values will be determined along with the Colony Simulator design)