A serious game to explore human foraging in a 3D environment.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Computer Science
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Traditional visual search tasks inform studies of attention.
• Recent research uses multiple-target search to study foraging behavior.
• Existing foraging tasks often use simplified 2D displays, limiting real-world applicability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel serious game for mobile platforms to simulate 3D foraging behavior.
• To provide a flexible research tool with adjustable parameters for custom experiments.
• To investigate foraging behavior in a realistic 3D environment and compare it to 2D tasks.

Main Methods:

• Developed a serious game using Unity3D for simulating animal foraging in a 3D environment.
• Implemented adjustable game settings for custom targets, distractors, and task parameters.
• Conducted two human foraging experiments within the 3D game environment.

Main Results:

• A standard feature/conjunction manipulation did not reduce foraging runs in the 3D environment.
• This finding contrasts with results from simpler, 2D foraging tasks.
• The 3D environment may alter the dynamics of visual search and foraging.

Conclusions:

• The developed 3D foraging game offers a versatile platform for cognitive research.
• Real-world foraging behavior may differ significantly from that observed in simplified 2D tasks.
• Further research is needed to explore the complexities of foraging in immersive 3D environments.