Get ready for serious games that improve your judgment

For years, video games have provided useful imitations of real-world scenarios. From flight simulations to military training, video games offer a low-risk environment to develop necessary experience. Now, a recent government intelligence program has taken that a step further, creating video games to improve cognitive skills.

The recurrent errors in our decision-making

In psychology, heuristics are the simple, efficient rules that people use to form judgments and make decisions. These classifiers are the effortless, intuitive thought processes that we have encoded into every facet of our daily lives for acts like forming sentences and recognizing faces. And they serve a crucial purpose. Unlike newborn children, we aren’t paralyzed in thought from every stimulus we encounter. We instead utilize millions of split-second mental shortcuts, accumulated over a lifetime, that allow us to function at a high level.