Sunday, November 29, 2015

A cognitive training system called the Hockey IntelliGym develops habits in hockey players to help them think faster and play better



Sporttechie.com
An Israeli-based company called Applied Cognitive Engineering (ACE), that has worked with the U.S. Air Force, NASA, and has trained fighter pilots, created a video game-like system called the Hockey IntelliGym to improve player performance on the ice. 

Hockey players have been seeing major benefits and improvements in all aspects of their game thanks to the IntelliGym system. The skills needed to make shots, avoid injury, plan skate paths, and recognize opportunities are all trainable outside the rink.

The Hockey IntelliGym is based on a concept originally created for Air Force fighter pilots by an Israeli researcher, Prof. Daniel Gopher. His goal was to train the brains of pilots on the land, using a cognitive trainer or simulator, so they would be better prepared for all the intangibles they could face in the air. The goal was to make anticipated challenges almost instinctive. The system was called Space Fortress.

Following great success, Gopher’s team joined forces with ACE to bring their revolutionary technological genius to sports. The Hockey IntelliGym system they created has shook the whole hockey world within its first three years and has proven to be the premiere training needed to take your game to new levels.

Studies have confirmed that attention control is a skill that can applied across different settings

Cognitive scientists have determined that the brain can be trained, just like any muscle in the gym or on the ice. The daily repetition of mental endurance, flexibility, and thinking on the fly, can all be taught just as easy as learning to skate or shoot a puck. Mental excellence has been proven by IntelliGym to be measurable, but more importantly, changeable.

“It has been shown that if trained, such attention control skills could be transferred and generalized across different settings and different task requirements, as long as the tasks maintained the same processing modality.” (Gopher, Armony & Greenshpan, 2000; Armony & Gopher, 2002).
A training performance evaluation discussing the reflection
of mental skills and on ice performance

In a 1994 study by Gopher and his team, cadets that had undergone a minimum of 10 hours of “gameplay” in Gopher’s new cognitive system, results identified more than a 30-percent improvement rate in flight performance in two of the leading air forces in the world. NASA was so blown away by the results Gopher’s team was seeing that they hired cognitive scientists to perform a study on cadets who either had or had not used Gopher’s system to see if they could pass an Apache helicopter simulator. The results showed a 100 percent success rate with the cadets that had used Gopher’s system, and only an 18 percent success rate with those who had not.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Slow And Steady Wins The Race

In a study performed at the university of California, Santa Barbara, subjects were tested to find the most effective way to teach students to have a deep understanding of unfamiliar material through a multimedia explanation. A multimedia explanation consists of words or pictures that provide a cause-and-effect account of how the system works.

The conclusion was that the most effective way is to provide pretraining aimed at helping learners understand the individual behaviors of each component, (which will keep the learners cognitive load down), before presenting a fast-paced continuous explanation of how a cause-and-effect system works.

The pretraining that the subjects encountered was a simple user interaction of the multimedia explanation, meaning that the subjects were allowed to move through the multimedia exclamation at their own pace, deciding when they were ready to move to the next image. This consisted of 16 successive segments of images with descriptions below them of how lightning works. The fast-paced continuous explanation was a 140 second video of the 16 successive segments of how lighting works.

In the first of two experiments performed, two subject groups were taken and show the multimedia explanation twice. The first group was presented the multimedia explanation with simple user interaction (part), followed by a second viewing of the multimedia explanation in a fast-paced (whole) form. The second group saw the multimedia explanation in whole, followed by a second viewing in part.

In the second experiment, the first subject group saw the multimedia explanation in part, and then again in part. While the second subject group saw the multimedia explanation in a whole, and then again in whole.

Upon completion of both viewings of the multi media explanation, before subject groups Took part in a three-part test to test their Cognitive Load Rating, Retention Test, and Transfer Test.

The Cognitive Load Rating was a simple question on a scale of 1 to 7 with 1 being very easy and 7 being very hard: How difficult was it for you to learn about lightning from the presentation you just saw?

The Retention Test asked the subjects:  Please write down how lightning works. The Retention test WAS used to see the major ideas that the four subject groups gathered by watching and/or interacting with the multimedia explanation.


The Transfer Test included 4 questions that tested the subjects on how they could apply the knowledge and find a deep understanding of the multimedia explanation that they saw. The 4 questions they were asked were:
1.     What could you do to decrease the intensity of lightning?
2.     Suppose you see the clouds in the sky but no lightning. Why not?
3.     What does air temperature had to do with lighting?
4.     What causes lightning?

The results from the Retention Test showed that all 4 subject groups maintained the same amount of big ideas whether they watched the multimedia explanations part-whole (PW), whole-part (WP), part-part (PP), or whole-whole (WW).

But the results from the Transfer Test gave the researchers conclusive results for what they were looking for. The Transfer Test showed that the PW performs better than the WP, as well as the PP performed better than the WW.

The study was looking to see if simple user interaction affected the cognitive load theory that simple user interaction reduces the learners cognitive load on working memory, thereby enabling the learner to progressively build a coherent mental model. The data from the Transfer Test supports this theory because the interactivity promoted a deeper learning of the multimedia explanation because the subject was able to work through the material at a slower pace and learn each component rather than being rushed through it in the conventional whole presentation.

When the subject takes time to learn each component at a slower pace, as given the opportunity with the PW or PP presentation, they can then build on what they previously learned to apply a larger deep understanding of the material they are being presented.

Whereas in a WP or WW presentation, the flow of words and pictures is overwhelming and the learner must devote more processing capacity to receive the words when fast-paced that they have no capacity left to mentally organize the incoming material and mentally integrate it with other knowledge.

In both experiment one and experiment two, the Cognitive Load Theory favors part presentation being presented first, as seen in PW and PP, because the user has time to slowly process information, and then see it again to learn minor details missed.

However, inserting interactivity does not improve learning. This is seen in the first experiment where one subject group sees the multimedia explanation whole, and then part, WP. This is because learn best when done how people I meant to learn (minimize cognitive load and allow to build using the two-stage construction of a mental model).

Through these experiments we gathered that Transfer Tests are a better measure of evaluating how well learners understand a multimedia explanation than Retention Tests. Transfer Tests show a deep understanding and the ability to apply their knowledge elsewhere, while Retention Tests show if the main and big ideas are retained.
Situations where the WW or WP presentations may be better would be in a situation when the goal is to promote automatic performance of the skill, or a situation where the goal is to promote learning of a larger academic lesson.

A few result limitations were that more research would be needed to show weather PW produces deeper learning than WP in long-term results as well. Another limitation is subjects in PP received more time than WW, so the results may not show if pace was a factor or longer study time for PP was a factor in improved Transfer Test results.


All in all, slowing down your cognitive workload by using simple user interactions to understand individual components of a cause-and-effect multimedia explanation is a more effective way to have a deeper understanding of material than the conventional whole presentation form of learning.