Franziska Brändle

Jun 20, 2024 | nature.com | Kelsey Allen |Franziska Brändle |Matthew Botvinick |Judith E. Fan |Samuel J. Gershman |Alison Gopnik | +14 more

AbstractBoard, card or video games have been played by virtually every individual in the world. Games are popular because they are intuitive and fun. These distinctive qualities of games also make them ideal for studying the mind. By being intuitive, games provide a unique vantage point for understanding the inductive biases that support behaviour in more complex, ecological settings than traditional laboratory experiments.

Jul 24, 2023 | nature.com | Samuel J. Gershman |Franziska Brändle

AbstractStudies of human exploration frequently cast people as serendipitously stumbling upon good options. Yet these studies may not capture the richness of exploration strategies that people exhibit in more complex environments. Here we study behaviour in a large dataset of 29,493 players of the richly structured online game ‘Little Alchemy 2’. In this game, players start with four elements, which they can combine to create up to 720 complex objects.