Dataset Information

Assessment of goal-directed behavior with the 3D videogame EPELI: Psychometric features in a web-based adult sample.

ABSTRACT: EPELI (Executive Performance in Everyday LIving) is a recently developed gaming tool for objective assessment of goal-directed behavior and prospective memory (PM) in everyday contexts. This pre-registered study examined psychometric features of a new EPELI adult online version, modified from the original child version and further developed for self-administered web-based testing at home. A sample of 255 healthy adults completed EPELI where their task was to perform household chores instructed by a virtual character. The participants also filled out PM-related questionnaires and a diary and performed two conventional PM tasks and an intelligence test. We expected that the more "life-like" EPELI task would show stronger associations with conventional PM questionnaires and diary-based everyday PM reports than traditional PM tasks would do. This hypothesis did not receive support. Although EPELI was rated as more similar to everyday tasks, performance in it was not associated with the questionnaires and the diary. However, there were associations between time-monitoring behavior in EPELI and the traditional PM tasks. Taken together, online adult-EPELI was found to be a reliable method with high ecological face validity, but its convergent validity requires further research.

SUBMITTER: Jylkka J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10030028 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Assessment of goal-directed behavior with the 3D videogame EPELI: Psychometric features in a web-based adult sample.

Jylkkä Jussi J Ritakallio Liisa L Merzon Liya L Kangas Suvi S Kliegel Matthias M Zuber Sascha S Hering Alexandra A Salmi Juha J Laine Matti M

PloS one 20230321 3

EPELI (Executive Performance in Everyday LIving) is a recently developed gaming tool for objective assessment of goal-directed behavior and prospective memory (PM) in everyday contexts. This pre-registered study examined psychometric features of a new EPELI adult online version, modified from the original child version and further developed for self-administered web-based testing at home. A sample of 255 healthy adults completed EPELI where their task was to perform household chores instructed b ...[more]

PMID: 36943848

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Project description:Humans have the ability to craft abstract, temporally extended and hierarchically organized plans. For instance, when considering how to make spaghetti for dinner, we typically concern ourselves with useful "subgoals" in the task, such as cutting onions, boiling pasta, and cooking a sauce, rather than particulars such as how many cuts to make to the onion, or exactly which muscles to contract. A core question is how such decomposition of a more abstract task into logical subtasks happens in the first place. Previous research has shown that humans are sensitive to a form of higher-order statistical learning named "community structure". Community structure is a common feature of abstract tasks characterized by a logical ordering of subtasks. This structure can be captured by a model where humans learn predictions of upcoming events multiple steps into the future, discounting predictions of events further away in time. One such model is the "successor representation", which has been argued to be useful for hierarchical abstraction. As of yet, no study has convincingly shown that this hierarchical abstraction can be put to use for goal-directed behavior. Here, we investigate whether participants utilize learned community structure to craft hierarchically informed action plans for goal-directed behavior. Participants were asked to search for paintings in a virtual museum, where the paintings were grouped together in "wings" representing community structure in the museum. We find that participants' choices accord with the hierarchical structure of the museum and that their response times are best predicted by a successor representation. The degree to which the response times reflect the community structure of the museum correlates with several measures of performance, including the ability to craft temporally abstract action plans. These results suggest that successor representation learning subserves hierarchical abstractions relevant for goal-directed behavior.

Dataset Information

Assessment of goal-directed behavior with the 3D videogame EPELI: Psychometric features in a web-based adult sample.

Publications

Assessment of goal-directed behavior with the 3D videogame EPELI: Psychometric features in a web-based adult sample.

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