The Morra Game as a Naturalistic Test Bed for Investigating Automatic and Voluntary Processes in Random Sequence Generation

Abstract

Morra is a 3,000-years-old hand game of prediction and numbers. The two players reveal their hand simultaneously, presenting a number of fingers between 1 and 5, while calling out a number between 2 and 10. Any player who successfully guesses the summation of fingers revealed by both players scores a point. While the game is extremely fast-paced, making it very difficult for players to achieve a conscious control of their game strategies, expert players regularly outperform non-experts, possibly with strategies residing out of conscious control. In this study, we used Morra as a naturalistic setting to investigate the necessity of attentive control in generation of sequence of items and the ability to proceduralize random number generation, which are both a crucial defensive strategy in Morra and a well-known empirical procedure to test the central executive capacity within the working memory model. We recorded the sequence of numbers generated by expert players in a Morra tournament in Sardinia (Italy) and by undergraduate students enrolled in a course-based research experience (CRE) course at Lawrence Technological University in the United States. Number sequences generated by non-expert and expert players both while playing Morra and in a random number generation task (RNGT) were compared in terms of randomness scores. Results indicate that expert players of Morra largely outperformed non-experts in the randomness scores only within Morra games, whereas in RNGT the two groups were very similar. Importantly, survey data acquired after the games indicate that expert players have very poor conscious recall of their number generation strategies used during the Morra game. Our results indicate that the ability of generating random sequences can be proceduralized and do not necessarily require attentive control. Results are discussed in the framework of the dual processing theory and its automatic-parallel-fast vs. controlled-sequential-slow polarities.

Characterizing human random-sequence generation in competitive and non-competitive environments using Lempel-Ziv complexity

“…Together, these results support previous findings that RSG seems decorrelated from consciousness 13 and suggest that it may be an automatic, involuntary process.…”

“…In particular, in a competitive environment with feedback-e.g., a matching-pennies game-humans exhibit higher sequential independence while apparently maintaining empirical equiprobability 2,11 . In addition, expert-level players in games where randomness provides a competitive advantage have been shown to be more random than novice players during the game, though this randomness did not extend to post-game non-competitive RSG 13 . However, while human randomness has been shown to be context dependent, it has not (to the best of our knowledge) been directly compared to nonhuman objective benchmarks-e.g., to pseudorandom series generation (pseudo-RSG) by computer algorithms.…”

A systemic transformation of an arts and sciences curriculum to nurture inclusive excellence of all students through course-based research experiences

“…As a result of our CRE intervention, several peer-reviewed journal articles have resulted from CRE courses. Examples of CRE studies resulting in peer-reviewed articles with at least one undergraduate student in the list of authors include publications in computer science (Kuminski and Shamir, 2016;Chung and Kocherovsky, 2018;Paul et al, 2018;Shamir et al, 2019;Pleune et al, 2020), psychology (Delogu et al, 2016(Delogu et al, , 2020aDelogu and Lilla, 2017;Delogu, 2020), and chemistry (Willbur et al, 2016;Zhou and Zhou, 2020;Large et al, 2023). In our experience, not all the students involved in a given CRE course are included in the list of authors for several reasons.…”

A Quantum Adaptation for the Morra Game and Some of Its Variants

“…Despite its simple functionality, Morra is rather difficult to play [10] [11]. It requires the cooperation of multiple cognitive, motor, and perceptual processes.…”