Chunking a Pull-Off

I’ve been working on final papers/projects the last few days, and have finished up most of them. I’m relatively proud of one, so I thought I’d share it with the readers of the weblog.

It’s entitled “Chunking a Pull-Off,” which sounds like some kind of sexual innuendo but is really just about Guitar Hero II and how experts perceive visual structures in the game that novices do not. I ran a very small pilot study for a class project (Educational Psychology 796, taught by David Shaffer), and these are the results. In a nutshell, experts appear to encode the visual information presented by the game in similar ways to how experts code other visual game information (such as chess) — they “chunk” the elements on the screen much the way that chess experts perceive meaningful relationships between pieces on a chess board (e.g., pawns in a defensive relationship).

I should note that this paper was, in fact, written for a class. This is not ongoing research and hasn’t been vetted by the local University of Wisconsin IRB boards, exempt because this was for the purposes of a class project. I’m not “publishing” these results by putting them on my own personal website any more than someone posting pictures of their kids constitutes publication of those images. I enjoyed writing this paper, and I’m now sharing it with whomever wants to read it.

Click here for the paper. My apologies for the rather ugly style of the paper page, I might pretty it up at some later date.