Attentional Cueing in Serious Games

Games, and serious games especially, revolve around learning new material and integrating this into a mental model. However, playing games can be cognitively demanding and novices may fail to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. To overcome this, one can try to subtly cue the attention of the player to the relevant material. We empirically tested the use of auditory cues to guide the player in learning the correct procedure in a 3D serious triage training game. Learning did not significantly improve in the auditory cueing condition and mental model construction was even significantly worse in the cueing condition, as compared to a control group with no cues. Implications for game design and future research are subsequently discussed.