My research interests (+ past projects)

1. Gaming  

• How cognitive skills, task load and team cohesion relate to performance
• Applying tools and techniques from sports psychology to game studies
• Using games for 'non-game'-research

2. Computational psychology

• Psychometric artificial intelligence
• Cognitive architectures in cognitive ergonomics

3. Cyber psychology + health care technology = online mental health

• Overcoming barries of care with technology
• Opinion-based voting and ideological segregation on Reddit

4. Statistics and research methodology

• Psychometrics - instrument construction
  • Finnish standardization of ITEA - Individuation Test for Emerging Adults
  • Lexical structure of Slovenian personality adjectives
• Experimental psychology
  • Web-based experimental methodology for behavioral sciences
    • JavaScript-based experiments on Node.js
    • My pet topic - check some posts at www.web-psychometrics.com

I just graduated

My interests in an enterprise setting...

Cyber psychology + health care technology

• Moodswing.io - simple mood-tracking web application ( + journal and daily triggers/keywords)

        -> Self help platform for cognitive behavioral therapy for sexual assault victims

Statistics and research methodology

• Psychometrics - survey and test analysis for UX research and analytics
• Web-based methodology!
  • "embedding" UX research
  • Behavioral artifacts - behavioral analytics
• 'Data science' - data journalism

Practice fusion

• health care technology

• young company

• learning opportunity

• • qualitative approach
  • interesting crossdisciplinary team
  • lots of areas to contribute to
• what I could contribute
  • quantitative approach
  • technical skills
  • tons of potential and an independent approach :)
  • intercultural skills and language

Research example - the League of Legends study

• Beginnings: observation and own experience
  • higher ranked players - higher cognitive fluency
• Players are distributed in teams -> team cognition
  • Games for research on teams
• No prior studies on the topic...
  • Instrument selection
    • Instrument construction and adaptation
      • team cohesion inventory, task load index
      • four tasks on cognitive skills
  • Broad, exploratory hypotheses

Challenges

• Web technologies
  • existing solutions written mostly in Flash or Java
    • From no JavaScript to full stack JavaScript
  • caring for the data validity
    • mobile access, screen resolution, multiple entries...
    • response time accuracy
    • cleaning up the data -> missing values
• Time of sampling

Findings

• The cohesion inventory for sports teams and the NASA task load index work great for game studies

• Effort and frustration are negatively related to team performance

• Simple response times appear important for gameplay, but different cognitive tests should be explored  

• Members from teams with higher task-oriented cohesion scored better on the planning task

What I learned

... methodologically speaking.

• Participant motivation is of huge importance
  • Drop outs and non-serious responses -> missing data after aggregation
    • Missing data is non-random
      • Do all you can to minimize it!
        • Personal contact 
        • Incentive
        • Information, feedback
        • Adaptive testing
        • Make participation convenient!
          • Sign up system and APIs

Let's talk!