AI Game Characters Offer New Window into the Human Mind and Behavior

The way we interact with AI video game characters can shed light on how the human mind works and reveal insights into human behavior, cooperation, and relationships. Here is a summary of the key points:

AI characters open up new avenues for studying the mind: AI-driven non-player characters (NPCs) in video games could enable neuroscientists and psychologists to probe more deeply into the mysteries of the human brain and behavior:

• Scientists have long used video games as research tools to study learning, navigation, decision-making and cooperation. AI characters could greatly expand the possibilities.
• Rich, immersive game worlds filled with realistic AI characters would allow researchers to cheaply and easily study how people respond to various social settings and interactions.

Understanding human relationships and attachments: As people form bonds with “virtual companions” like AI girlfriends and boyfriends, studying player interactions with AI game characters could provide insights into these novel human-AI relationships:

• Hugo Spiers, a neuroscientist at University College London, says “People are forming a relationship with an artificial agent. That’s inherently interesting. Why would you not want to study that?”
• Observing how players engage with AI characters can reveal insights about human cooperation and competition.

The advantages of using games for research: Video games provide unique benefits as scientific research tools compared to traditional experiments:

• People are intrinsically motivated to play games, so large numbers of research subjects can be recruited at low cost. Spiers collected navigational data from over 4 million Sea Hero Quest players across 195 countries.
• Games allow scientists to explore fun, curiosity and other fundamental human experiences and motivations.

Probing specific aspects of cognition: Spiers is interested in using AI-driven characters to learn more about the neural basis of human hunting behaviors and how the brain enables people to cooperate while hunting – an area where current knowledge is limited.

Advancing AI to enable new discoveries: As AI in video games becomes more sophisticated, from generating characters to entire game worlds, the technology could open up even more avenues for scientists to unravel the complexities of the human mind through the lens of gaming interactions and behaviors. AI is poised to make video games a more powerful tool than ever before for psychological and neuroscientific research.