Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Tik Tik is a serious game designed to study the cognitive mechanisms of planning by combining ecologically valid navigational demands with a highly flexible problem structure. Drawing on data from three studies totaling 122 participants, we show that Tik Tik problem difficulty is primarily driven by a smart, non-exhaustive search of its problem space, in which character trajectories are represented. Furthermore, we find that working memory and visuo-motor skills contribute, highlighting the types of cognitive representations and skills Tik Tik also taps. Our four-parameter model incorporating these factors explains a large proportion of the variance in problem difficulty. Finally, we compare these cognitive demands to those of the most popular planning task, the Tower of London, highlighting commonalities and differences between these two tasks.