Innovations

Innovations in xDelia

Current approaches to developing financial decision skills draw heavily on normative-rational models of decision making, undervalue the importance of context, and, importantly, disregard significant advances in expertise research, cognitive neurosciences, and experimental economics and break-through innovations in wearable sensor technologies and serious games. However, recent developments in cognitive neurosciences, wearable sensors, and game research are preparing the ground to more effectively address the problems of learner performance, skill training, and skill transfer in financial decision making. This page describes the different areas of knowledge and technology in which xDelia is expected to make a contribution.

Expertise and deliberate practice

Studies which examine investor and trader behaviour in ecologically valid settings and which effectively distinguish between novice and expert performance are rare. xDelia offers the opportunity to develop approaches to understanding investor and trader behaviour as expert performance in a specialised domain. This has the potential to significantly advance both our understanding of expertise and our understanding of financial decision-making.

Wearable physiological sensors for bio-feedback in decision systems

There only exist a handful of applications similar to those proposed in xDelia, in which physiological sensors and brain-computer interfaces have been used. xDelia creates a new area of application for the field of psychophysiology and the use of physiological sensors for cognitive and emotional monitoring. Moreover, we expect that xDelia will significantly contribute to the emerging research discipline of physioeconomics. To have a system that can not only be used for laboratory studies but also for real-world applications it is important to use unobtrusive, noninvasive wearable sensors which do not disturb the persons who are using it.

Design and evaluation framework

The Design and Evaluation framework embodies a novel approach to interdisciplinary working. It provides a structure that highlights the different project activities and reveals the impact they have on the achievement of overall project goals. It helps articulate the design and evaluation aspects of the project and shows how these are inter-related. By feeding back the findings to inform the design of project activities, the framework allows us to learn from our mistakes and helps to ensure that the project works as a coherent whole rather than as disparate participating institutions. Partners learn with and from each other and use a range of collaborative technologies to support a growing knowledge-base that acts as a project-wide resource.

Emotion, cognitive biases, and emotion regulation in decision making

Deliberate practice coupled with appropriate feedback may reduce path dependence, an important problem in decision making, via (inter alia) more effective emotion regulation. Differences between experts and non-experts in path dependence, and the effectiveness of deliberate practice and feedback to mitigate these effects have not been studied in detail before. Moreover, neuroscience research of affect and cognition is only slowly translating into improved understanding of emotion and cognition in naturalistic decision-making settings. This project will help bride this gap in some highly important real-world decision domains.

Cognitive framework for game design

Within the current state of the art very little has been accomplished in terms of schemas of how design features correlate and vary in relation to each other or how to map methods from player interaction features to theoretical models. xDelia will provide a framework embracing these issues. The framework will provide guidelines of how to design serious games for a specific purpose. In particular, the project will identify game designs that lead to players developing specific cognitive schemas representing financial decision making competence.

Advanced feedback mechanisms in game-based learning

The approach to game-based learning in xDelia takes the perspective of comparing decision making in gameplay with decision and behavioral models. In addition, games and also sensors provide active feedback about emotional states during task performance, allowing us to improve our understanding of how emotional states affect decision rationality and effectiveness in gameplay. While this knowledge may be of benefit for entertainment game development, for instance providing designers with a scientific understanding of the foundations of ‘fun’, there are much more direct benefits for the development of serious games. Here, the primary drivers of game designs are the actual requirements of cognitive skill training and emotional orchestration within decision processes.

Skill transfer from serious games to the real world

A critical issue in the development of serious games is the problem of skill transfer between the game task and the real activity. xDelia offers the opportunity to develop a methodology and a framework for understanding specific cognitive skills acquired by game players as a function of the actual game mechanics and game design features. This will provide a methodology for ensuring skill transfer and successful serious game development that could be used for many forms of serious games in addition to those developed within the xDelia project.