July 18 2025,
The Exploration 2024 Awards holders have been announced and we are pleased to announce that David Benrimoh is one of the winners.
The objective of the Exploration stream is to support high-risk, high-reward and interdisciplinary research. It seeks to inspire projects that bring disciplines together beyond traditional disciplinary or common interdisciplinary approaches by research teams with the capacity to explore something new that might fail, but that has the potential for significant impact. impact important.
This competition is open to teams composed of established and/or early career researchers.
David Benrimoh has been awarded a grant for a research project entitled Developing a game-based computational testing platform for mental health assessment, with Jérôme Waldispühl as Co-Principal Investigator (Mc Gill University) and in collaboration with Al Powers (Yale University).
Developing a game-based computational testing platform for mental health assessment I Research summary
Alterations in various domains of cognitive function are key findings in psychiatric disorders. Batteries of cognitive tests have been created with a view to diagnosing, predicting, and guiding treatment for different illnesses, such as psychotic disorders. Computational modeling approaches, such as Reinforcement Learning, the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter, and Active Inference models, have allowed for the estimation of latent computational parameters from task behavior, but insights from these computational methods have not been translated consistently to the clinic. Reasons for this include constraints on time, resources, and technical expertise, as well as the fact that tasks can be long, repetitive, and boring. In addition, their limited ecological validity constrains generalization to clinical settings. One approach to improving adoption and dissemination of computational tasks has been “gamification”, in the form of adding narrative framing and an engaging aesthetic to a behavioral task (e.g. Sea Hero Quest in Alzheimer’s research). There are limitations to this approach: resulting tasks have fundamentally similar dynamics and lengths as the original tasks, with only marginal improvement to their ecological validity. We aim to develop a novel research tool to bridge this gap by making use of the expertise available in modern video game design to create a game that integrates behavioral tasks into its structure. It differentiates itself from other efforts by 1) improving ecological validity by maintaining player agency and utilizing fewer abstract scenarios and goals and 2) leveraging overlapping game elements to maximize the efficiency of latent parameter estimation. This would be an open-world game in which players are tasked with reaching a goal and must overcome challenges on their way, incorporating elements of existing tasks. The tool would use built-in computational modeling to generate insights from player choices and behaviors. It is intended to be customizable, allowing users to alter parameters based on their needs. This tool would be useful as a digital biomarker, research tool, or screening program for mental illnesses such as psychosis. This is the first project aimed at creating an integrated game environment for mental health assessment aimed at providing actionable insights to clinicians and patients and as such is a high-risk endeavor, requiring innovations in game and task design and computational modeling in order to be successful.
Congratulations!