Minecraft is a movie and a very popular video game with iconic block graphics that characters can "mine" for building material and gems. It's also what cognitive scientist Charley Wu and his team utilized to study how people learned as they played. Their unique study focused on both individual and social learning — and they found a clear answer to which players were most successful. (Hint: Get you a player who can do both.) Their results were published recently in the journal Nature Communications. Want to hear more about new science research? Let us know by emailing [email protected] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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So in this study, researchers created a few scenarios where it would be more or less advantageous for Minecraft players to mimic other players to, for example, mine around the spot where they saw other players on their screen gathering gems.
In some scenarios the rewards were clustered which altered how much players had to interact with each other and learn socially. And what the researchers found is that the most successful players were the most adaptive like switching between individual mining and using social learning when the situation called for it.
So Charlie and his team, they analyzed all of these scenarios and they created a computer model that was able to take in what each player saw on their screen and predicted to a pretty good degree of accuracy how individual learning works in conjunction with social learning.
Okay, but what does he mean by that? It means that individual learning and social learning are informing each other. And like that flexibility between switching between both of them is like the key to being really successful. And that's actually new. And using Minecraft to find that is also unique.
That looks really different. from traditional psychology experiments. And it tells us something about the dynamics of social learning that we miss when we put people into really simple environments where they're choosing either to gather information firsthand or to copy someone else.
This is Natalia Velez, another cognitive scientist who didn't work on the study. And she pointed out something else that's cool about it. Video games are incredibly popular among kids. It's where they often meet up and build social connections they may not otherwise have.
And it's important that research keeps up with these like modern social interactions.
Very interesting. I also point out video games quite popular with me.
Yeah, same, same.
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