Analysis of Subjects' Vulnerability in a Touch Screen Game Using Behavioral Metrics

Area of Science:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Cognitive Psychology
• Experimental Psychology

Background:

• Assessing mental workload is crucial for understanding user performance and experience.
• Player vulnerability in games can arise from unfamiliar difficulty levels.
• Behavioral and physiological metrics offer potential indicators of cognitive load.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate behavioral metrics for inferring mental workload changes in players.
• To assess player vulnerability in a touch-screen game with varying difficulty.
• To identify metrics decoupled from task specifics for broader applicability.

Main Methods:

• Experimental study with volunteer subjects playing a touch-screen game at two difficulty levels.
• Collected behavioral data including finger kinematics and decision-making times.
• Compared behavioral metrics with performance and physiological (pnn50 heart rate) baseline data.

Main Results:

• Certain behavioral metrics, derived from finger kinematics and decision times, correlate with mental workload changes.
• These metrics were found to be effective in inferring workload differences across game difficulty levels.
• The identified metrics showed potential for assessing task-load and player vulnerability.

Conclusions:

• Behavioral metrics can serve as reliable indicators of mental workload and player vulnerability.
• These findings have implications for designing adaptive game difficulty and user interfaces.
• The developed metrics offer a versatile approach for workload assessment in diverse experimental settings.