UCL
Keynote talk
Using an app to study world-wide cognition
Most research in psychology focuses on samples from western industrialised countries and often from student populations. Extending beyond this is important to understand diversity in the human population, and examine the impact that geography, culture and economics of nations can have on cognition. In this presentation I will discuss recent research from my group and collaborators using our Sea Hero Quest app. Sea Hero Quest is a research experiment embedded in an engaging commercial video game, where the participants navigate a boat through different ocean environments in search of sea creatures. Via broad advertising we were able to test over 4 million participants, with samples in all 195 nations of the world. Careful sampling of the data has allowed for population level analysis of performance and demographics from 67 countries resulting so far in a range of findings about spatial cognition and cultural, economic and geographic clustering in the data (see e.g. Coutrot et al. 2022 Nature).
