Game for Impact

Introduced in the 1930s by psychologist John Ridley Stroop, the Stroop effect is people’s tendency to experience difficulty naming a physical color when it is used to spell the name of a different color. While it seems as though the Stroop effect is no more than just an interesting phenomenon of human psychology, it actually illustrates a lot about the way people process information. For example, it helps us to assess our ability to override our heuristic fast thinking, and the ability to utilize our selective attention, as well as to maximize speed of processing. The psychological and clinical implications of Stroop effect are abundant. Many psychologists have used it as a way of testing people’s inhibitory control, a core cognitive and executive function that controls our automatic urges for more appropriate behavioral responses to stimulus. It is of great significance to our normal functioning as it regulates our behavior; if it’s impaired or poorly developed, serious consequences can apply such as malfunctioning.

As one of the most important sub skills of executive functions, inhibitory control, selective attention, and the speed of processing are crucial to children’s developmental trajectory. Effective external interventions can improve children’s executive functions (Raver & Blair, 2016). As game developers and designers who believe that play can have a serious impact on learning and development, we want to design a serious game that trains children’s cognitive abilities and to keep adults’ brains sharp using Stroop effect as an essential part of our learning mechanism. The thing that we want to do is not new in the field, there is a consortium of researchers at NYU CREATE lab who are dedicated to design evidence-based digital media that address the needs of all learners, and they have released three digital games that are proven efficient in training children’s cognitive abilities. Therefore, we wrote this design document proposing our idea and prototype to the CREATE lab at NYU, looking for financial and professional support in this collaborative project that hopefully can effectively sharpen learner’s cognitive skills with our dedication and effort.