Evaluating planning through play: Exploring the use of mini games to assess planning abilities

Planning, or the ability to generate, organize, and implement a sequence of steps toward a goal, is essential for success across a wide range of activities, from preparing a meal to developing a software program. Indeed, robust planning abilities have been found to predict math achievement in children and support independent living in older adults. However, common tasks used to measure planning often fail to correlate with one another, suggesting they may not assess the same underlying skill. To explore a novel approach to measuring planning, this study examined performance on four planning mini games, a non-planning control game, and a battery of cognitive tasks measuring related cognitive skills, including three standard planning tasks. As hypothesized, the planning mini games showed stronger intercorrelations than previously shown between traditional tasks, suggesting they may capture a more consistent and unified planning construct. Notably, two of the selected mini games emerged as particularly promising paradigms for assessing planning skills. These findings provide initial evidence that mini games such as those explored here could complement or replace traditional cognitive planning tasks, offering an appropriately complex evaluation of the multifaceted skill of planning.