A neuroergonomic approach to human performance assessment in e-gaming

Abstract

Advancing the understanding of the neurophysiological function that underlies real-world human performance is a primary goal of neuroergonomics, a field at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, biomedical engineering, psychology, and human factors research. The neuroergonomic approach utilizes mobile and wearable neurotechnologies to record biomedical signals in concert with behavior in natural everyday settings to provide the opportunity for understanding the continuum of the brain, body, behavior, and environment in both individual and team outcomes. This dissertation applies a neuroergonomic approach to assess cognitive and performance differences between novice and experienced electronic game players. Electronic gaming has become a widespread activity across age groups and has generated increasing interest as a potential platform for studying perception, attention, decision making, and skill development. First-person shooter (FPS) games are particularly relevant for this purpose because they require rapid visuomotor coordination, continuous updating of environmental information, flexible attentional control, response inhibition, strategic decision making, and, in multiplayer settings, coordinated teamwork. These demands overlap with cognitive and socio-cognitive skills required in complex operational domains such as aviation, military operations, surgery, and other high-performance environments. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and behavioral performance measures, this dissertation examines how FPS gaming experience relates to cognitive control, prefrontal cortical activation, neural efficiency, and team performance. First, experienced and novice FPS players were assessed during validated laboratory tasks targeting key cognitive-control domains, including updating, shifting, and inhibition. This study evaluated whether gaming experience was associated with differences in behavioral performance and prefrontal hemodynamic responses during discrete cognitive tasks. Second, the same cohort was examined during single-player FPS gameplay to determine how expertise, gameplay strategy, and performance demands influenced prefrontal activation and neural efficiency in a more ecologically valid task environment. Third, cooperative multiplayer FPS gameplay was used to investigate how individual expertise, team composition, physical proximity, and strategy influenced behavioral and neurophysiological markers of collaborative performance. Across studies, experienced players demonstrated patterns consistent with greater neural efficiency, including comparable or improved behavioral performance with reduced or more focal prefrontal activation during selected cognitive and gameplay conditions. The findings also suggest that strategic role, task context, and team configuration shape the relationship between neural activation and performance, highlighting the importance of studying cognition in ecologically valid and interactive environments. Together, these studies demonstrate the value of FPS gaming as a controlled yet naturalistic platform for neuroergonomic performance assessment. The findings contribute to understanding how gaming experience is associated with cognitive-control processes, neural efficiency, and distributed team cognition. More broadly, this work supports the use of wearable neuroimaging and behavioral analytics to study complex human performance beyond traditional laboratory paradigms and may inform the future design of training systems for specialized domains that require rapid decision making, adaptive control, and effective teamwork.