The Empower project has presented two of the nine games that its application will provide to work on executive functions with children with neurodevelopmental disorders, the Sustained Attention Game and the Memory Training Game. The initiative aims to help students with neurodevelopmental conditions and will design different training materials and carry out several scientific studies aimed at demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
The Sustained Attention Game is based on the comprehensive continuous task designed to improve the function of sustained attention. This game will train the cognitive system to activate and maintain attention at an optimal level for prolonged periods of time while simultaneously inhibiting the response system.
The task involves a long series of stimuli presented sequentially with the participant instructed to respond as fast as possible only when a pre-specified target is presented, while withholding responses to other stimuli appearing on the screen.
This activity has three levels with three sub-levels each, where the main target is always a specific mushroom and the distractors change depending on the level. Also, the position where the stimuli can appear are different depending on the sub-level selected. Between the possible distractors you can find flowers, small branches, butterflies and other types of mushrooms
The app controls the performance of the child, measuring the correct and incorrect answers both when the target is present and not present and the response time for each trial (calculating after the mean response time for the game).
As for the Memory Training Game, it is founded on tasks that train the ability to dynamically modify the content of the memory according to task requests. The proposal will assess and train children's working memory by asking them to remember the sequence in which peppers change their colour from green to yellow in a set of pepper plants.
The first of the main tasks in the game is to sort the ripe peppers in the correct basket, depending on their quality: the pepper with a worm needs to go to a specific basket to be cut and cleaned for later use, while the good pepper (without worm) needs to be collected in another basket to be sold later on the market.
Therefore, in the first task, the child must select the correct basket where the pepper must be collected to separate the good and bad peppers for the market. This must be done while the child is focused on the order in which the peppers change their colour to yellow.
The second of the main tasks is based on selecting the peppers in their plants in the correct order in which they became yellow. Depending on the level, the child will see 2, 3 or 4 peppers changing their colour and, then, they will have to select the same number of peppers with the mouse trying to reproduce the correct sequence. The game will always have 9 pepper plants and the order in which the peppers change their colour are completely random.
The app controls the performance of the child, measuring the correct and incorrect answers both for the sorting task and for the selection of the order task. Also, the response time is controlled in each trial (calculated after the mean response time for the game).
IRTIC is in charge of IT development and ISCTE of Portugal and UBB of Romania, two of the project partners, are in charge of defining the exercises. The rest of the Empower consortium is composed of the University of Stichting Radboud in the Netherlands, the Institute of Systems and Computer Engineering in Portugal, the Hogskulen pa vestlandet University in Norway and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in Romania, which are four university departments in the technological area specialising in artificial intelligence, eye-tracking and biosensors.
The company IT Data Telekom from Romania, in charge of the creation of training contents, also participates in the project. The association Autism-Europe, an organisation based in Brussels that gathers around a hundred organisations from more than 40 European countries, completes this consortium leading the dissemination of the project results.
The European Commission's Research Executive Agency (REA) co-funds the project through the Horizon Europe Programme, having been selected in the "Inclusion in times of change" call under the "Transformations" call of the programme.
Project website: https://project-empower.eu/
Video App Sustained Attention Game
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