The aim of this study was to develop and initially validate a TMM3 puzzle video game that engages visual search ability in a playful and engaging way, permits control over task difficulty parameters, and enables collection of data useful for researchers. Tile-matching match-3 (TMM3) puzzle video games require finding and matching 3 tiles of the same type on a board of tiles that differ on some dimensions. Studies indicate that visual search can be improved following training on visual search tasks and match-3 puzzle video games. More complex visual search is often affected in aging, in neurodegenerative diseases, and after brain injury. The number of stimuli on the display (set size) and perceptual dimension of the stimuli are varied to manipulate the complexity of visual search tasks. Search skills are usually assessed with visual search tasks, where a target stimulus is presented among distractor stimuli on a display. Visual search is the ability to find target objects in complex visual scenes in everyday life. Participants rated their perception and the usability of the task and completed neuropsychological tests that measure cognitive domains engaged by the puzzle game. In a user study with 28 young adults (aged 18 to 31 years), 13 older (aged 64 to 79 years) and 11 oldest (aged 86 to 98 years) adults played the long (young and older adults) or short version (oldest adults) of the difficulty levels of the SMT. For each puzzle board, there is exactly 1 possible match ( single target search). Each trial consists of 4 consecutive puzzle boards, where the goal of the task is to find a target tile configuration ( search) on the puzzle board and swap 2 adjacent tiles to create a line of 3 identical tiles ( match). For each difficulty level, large numbers of playable trials were pregenerated using Python. A wide range of difficulty levels was generated by combinations of 3 task variables over a range from 4 to 8 including height and width of the puzzle board (set size) and the numbers of tile types (distractor heterogeneity). The SMT is played on a grid-based (width × height) puzzle board, filled with different types of colored polygons.
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