Community Event

Wednesday, August 13, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm, Room TBA

Naturalistic Games as a Benchmark to Bridge Cognitive Science, Computational Neuroscience and AI: A Community Led, Round-Table Discussion

Jascha Achterberg1, Laurence Hunt1, Chris Summerfield1, Anna Székely2; 1University of Oxford, 2Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Abstract

In this round-table workshop, we will discuss video games as a potential testbed for comparing biological and artificially intelligent behaviour. Video games capture much of the complexity of real-world decision tasks, such as vast state spaces, multi-step action sequences, interactions with objects and agents, and dynamic interleaving of planning and execution. Yet crucially, they also present an experimentally and computationally tractable testbed which allows for experimental manipulations, and comparison of human vs. machine behaviour and internal computations. We will have short talks from researchers currently using video games as a tool for understanding human and artificial cognition. One central aim will be to identify robust, reliable benchmarks with which human and artificial agents can be compared. The main outcome of this workshop, if successful, would be a co-designed project that is shaped by input from across the CCN community, where resulting data analysis/modelling is shared across a number of labs.

Session Plan

Our workshop will begin with an opportunity for participants to give ‘pitch talks’ (30-45 minutes) in which they pitch an idea about games, benchmarks, or current ongoing research that they consider relevant. If you are attending CCN and would like to be considered for a pitch talk, please fill out our online form.

Participants will then be split into breakout groups (~45 minutes), to discuss the following questions:

  • What constitutes a useful benchmark against which to evaluate human behavioural and/or neural data during naturalistic gameplay?
  • What unique questions in cognitive science/neuroscience/AI might be addressed using naturalistic games that are difficult to address using traditional experimental design?
  • What computational models are most appropriate for comparison with human behavioural and neural data in studying naturalistic behaviour with games?

We will then reconvene for a collective discussion for the remaining time, and summarise how this might inform a future, co-designed data collection project.