Before medical school, Wyoming WWAMI student Elizabeth Girling (E25) worked as a software engineer. This summer, she put those skills to work in the Fine Lab at the UW Center for Neuroscience, designing a video game to study how the brain responds to reward.
Working with her Principal Investigator, Dr. Ione Fine, Elizabeth’s task was to build a game modeled after an earlier study that had produced reliable results on reward center activation. She based her experiment on a 2003 study and began programming a 2D platformer, which she describes as “think like Mario or Fireboy and Watergirl.” She built the game so it could be controlled easily from the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) command room, and wrote scripts that run during gameplay to collect metadata.
“This was a great intersection between medicine/research and my previous experience as a software engineer,” she said.
In the game, the participant plays a knight crossing a grassy landscape. About every six seconds, the knight encounters a non-player character and must act: swing the sword if it’s a goblin, or save it if it’s an angel. The window for responding adjusts continuously based on the player’s success rate and reaction time, keeping them engaged throughout.
That engagement is the point. Previous studies of reward response, particularly in the nucleus accumbens, relied on less engaging tasks. “Anyone who has done a psych study where they stare at black and white shapes for an hour knows the painful monotony,” Elizabeth said.
The thesis behind her approach is that a game with characters will produce better results because participants will care more. That could matter most for groups that don’t do well with monotonous tasks, such as people diagnosed with ADHD and children. These populations are largely left out of research because of poor data, and this kind of testing paradigm could help include them.
Elizabeth designed the experiment, programmed the game, and ran pilot participants through the fMRI scanner. She spent the first month and a half of summer designing and coding, then flew to Seattle, trained on fMRI protocols, made last-minute fixes as bugs surfaced, and began running participants.
“It was very rewarding to combine the skills I learned in my computer science degree and during my short career as a software engineer in the name of my new career, medicine,” she said. “It was also super cool to be in the room where it was happening and be able to tweak and change the game as we started actually hooking it up to the scanner.”
She even got to go into the fMRI and play the game she created.
Data is still being analyzed, but a preliminary analysis has identified BOLD activation during NPC encounters, suggesting brain activity consistent with Knutson et al. (2003). Elizabeth is now helping an aspiring medical student work through the data. If the results hold up, she plans to write a paper with the analyst and Dr. Fine and pursue publication.