Serious Gaming or: Taking Gaming Seriously

Speaker:
Dominik Deffner, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

Join the talk on Zoom

Abtract: Collective dynamics emerge from countless individual decisions. Yet, it remains poorly understood how individuals in dynamically-interacting groups decide to weigh personal and social information and how this balance shapes individual and collective outcomes. Collective foraging—finding and collecting spatially distributed resources—provides an ideal testbed to study social decision-making in a controlled, yet ecologically relevant context. In this talk, I will focus on two immersive-reality experiments where groups of participants searched for hidden rewards in different resource environments. Capturing high-resolution visual and spatial data streams, we developed different computational modelling approaches to infer strategic decision-making from unconstrained social interactions. I will also touch on a mechanistic agent-based simulation framework as well as our ongoing fieldwork on collective ice-fishing in North Karelia, Finland. Overall, our studies shed new light on the individual-level decisions and spatio-temporal patterns underlying collective dynamics.

Bio: Dominik is a computational behavioral scientist with training in psychology, evolutionary biology and statistics. Combining theoretical and empirical research, his overarching goal is to better understand how individuals, collectives and populations adapt to changing and uncertain environments. He mostly uses simulations as well as computational modeling of naturalistic group experiments and field data to study how culture and other collective dynamics emerge from individual decisions, facilitating the unique adaptability of our species