Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Why games? How could anyone consider action gamesas experimental paradigms for Cognitive Science? In 1973,as one of three strategies he proposed for advancing Cogni-tive Science, Allen Newell exhorted us to “accept a singlecomplex task and do all of it.” More specifically, he told usthat rather than taking an “experimental psychology as usualapproach” that, we should “focus on a series of experimentaland theoretical studies around a single complex task” so as todemonstrate that our theories of human cognition were pow-erful enough to explain, “a genuine slab of human behavior”with the studies fitting into a detailed theoretical picture. Ac-tion games represent the type of experimental paradigms thatNewell was advocating and the current state of programmingexpertise and laboratory equipment, along with the emer-gence of Big Data (Griffiths, 2015) and Naturally OccurringData Sets (NODS, Goldstone & Lupyan, 2016), provide thetechnologies and data needed to realize his vision. ActionGames enable us to escape from our field’s regrettable fo-cus on novice performance to develop theories that accountfor the full range of expertise through a twin focus on ex-pertise sampling (across individuals) and longitudinal studies(within individuals) of simple and complex tasks.This Symposium is inspired by the recent Action Gamesas Experimental Paradigms for Cognitive Science (Game-XP), issue of Topics in Cognitive Science (topiCS), April2017. It includes late-breaking work from some of the re-searchers represented in that topic as well as new work bynew researchers.