Recent research has demonstrated broad benefits of video game play to perceptual and cognitive abilities. These broad improvements suggest that video game-based cognitive interventions may be ideal to combat the many perceptual and cognitive declines associated with advancing age. Furthermore, game interventions have the potential to induce higher rates of intervention compliance compared to other cognitive interventions as they are assumed to be inherently enjoyable and motivating. We explored these issues in an intervention that tested the ability of an action game and a “brain fitness” game to improve a variety of abilities. Cognitive abilities did not significantly improve, suggesting caution when recommending video game interventions as a means to reduce the effects of cognitive aging. However, the game expected to produce the largest benefit based on previous literature (an action game) induced the lowest intervention compliance. We explain this low compliance by participants’ ratings of the action game as less enjoyable and by their prediction that training would have few meaningful benefits. Despite null cognitive results, data provide valuable insights into the types of video games older adults are willing to play and why.

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Effective team process is critical for the performance of cyber security teams. To examine this, we observed two comparably skilled cyber security teams participating in the International Capture the Flag (iCTF) competition held in December 2011. At the conclusion of the competition, we followed up with a focus group discussion with six members from the two teams. In this paper, we present our findings from the focus group interviews, on the relationship between team level factors and team performance. Findings from the focus group discussion indicate that team level factors such as team communication, coordination, team structure, and leadership play important roles in team performance.

Stories of cyber-attacks have been prevalent in the public media and the cyber security market has grown greatly to help meet this demand. However, much of the effort has been focused on development of better hardware and software solutions with little thought to the human factors of cyber security. This investigation sought to gain a better understanding of the influence cyber-attacks have on the decisionmaking and collaboration of distributed team members working together to solve a complex logic problem. Eight three-person teams worked together to piece together bits of information to solve a potential terrorist attack. The time and outcome scores were evaluated for the three experimental conditions, which varied the levels of information injected. The goal of the injected statements was to disrupt the decision-making and collaborative process. Injects that were explicitly negating true facts had the more detrimental effect on team performance while performance in the condition with injects that were more suggestive in nature were no different from the no inject condition. These results shed light into the breakdown in team decisionmaking when confronted with a contradictory fact thus aiding in our knowledge to build robust collaborative tools.

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