Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

BrainLeap helps kids pay attention with The Attention Arcade

“Eye movement is tied to attention”

Make the shrooms go boom with your destruct-o-vision! Also, improve your attention!
Make the shrooms go boom with your destruct-o-vision! Also, improve your attention!

“What I was doing before wasn’t nearly as cool,” says Jeff Coleman, CEO of BrainLeap Technologies, the company he co-founded with his wife, UCSD researcher Leanne Chukoskie and her colleague, UCSD professor Jeanne Townsend. “This is something that is going to change the trajectory of millions of kids’ lives.” “This” is The Attention Arcade, a suite of video games designed to help kids pay attention.

When I think of video games, I think of my boys shooting at things onscreen as chaos surrounds them: maps, charts, inventories, terrain — and oh yes, people shooting back at them. The panoply of sight and sound dizzies me. But they have no trouble processing the flood of visual data, even as they carry on conversations with friends. So BrainLeap’s model makes a certain amount of intuitive sense to me, even as I instinctively push back against another opportunity for screen time. “Some of those first-person shooter games actually benefit attention,” affirms Coleman. “But while those games are designed to entertain, ours are designed to train. The eye tracker makes a world of difference.”

Sponsored
Sponsored
The tobii eye-tracker that makes everything possible.

The eye tracker, a narrow bar that sits below your computer screen and does just what it says in the title, is what made The Attention Arcade possible. “Eye movement is tied to attention,” explains Coleman. “We’re leveraging that, strengthening the connections between the different parts of the brain that you need to attend to things better” — parts involving, say, self-control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. “We’ve likened it to doing a cartwheel. Once you ‘get’ how to do it, it’s not a lot of effort, because your body is working and moving all together.” Train someone to control and direct their eye movements, and you train them to control and direct their attention. “Some of the kids in the initial study were of driving age, and afterwards, they said they could ‘see better’ when they were driving. It’s not that their vision was better, it’s that they were able to attend to more things.” In a more academic setting, that might mean being able to keep the mathematical order of operations in mind even as you focus on a particular problem.

The Arcade trains eye movements by using the eye tracker to turn your gaze into your game controller. “One child said it was like having superpowers,” says Coleman, and it’s not hard to see why. Consider Shroomdigger. All you have to do is spot the mushrooms scattered about a crowded landscape and stare at them steadily. As you stare, they shrink and eventually disappear. Focus improves. Distractibility decreases. And you’re making things disappear with just your eyes. (Of course, it’s not quite a superpower; for one thing, you have to train. “At the outset, kids may get tired in 10 minutes,” notes Coleman.)

“The initial research was funded by the National Institutes of Health,” concludes Coleman. “Fully 23 of the 23 kids who finished the study saw benefits. That’s very unusual in a human study, and that’s what motivated my co-founders.”

The latest copy of the Reader

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

Live Five: Songwriter Sanctuary, B-Side Players, The Crawdaddys, Saint Luna, Brawley

Reunited, in the round, and onstage in Normal Heights, East Village, Little Italy, Encinitas
Make the shrooms go boom with your destruct-o-vision! Also, improve your attention!
Make the shrooms go boom with your destruct-o-vision! Also, improve your attention!

“What I was doing before wasn’t nearly as cool,” says Jeff Coleman, CEO of BrainLeap Technologies, the company he co-founded with his wife, UCSD researcher Leanne Chukoskie and her colleague, UCSD professor Jeanne Townsend. “This is something that is going to change the trajectory of millions of kids’ lives.” “This” is The Attention Arcade, a suite of video games designed to help kids pay attention.

When I think of video games, I think of my boys shooting at things onscreen as chaos surrounds them: maps, charts, inventories, terrain — and oh yes, people shooting back at them. The panoply of sight and sound dizzies me. But they have no trouble processing the flood of visual data, even as they carry on conversations with friends. So BrainLeap’s model makes a certain amount of intuitive sense to me, even as I instinctively push back against another opportunity for screen time. “Some of those first-person shooter games actually benefit attention,” affirms Coleman. “But while those games are designed to entertain, ours are designed to train. The eye tracker makes a world of difference.”

Sponsored
Sponsored
The tobii eye-tracker that makes everything possible.

The eye tracker, a narrow bar that sits below your computer screen and does just what it says in the title, is what made The Attention Arcade possible. “Eye movement is tied to attention,” explains Coleman. “We’re leveraging that, strengthening the connections between the different parts of the brain that you need to attend to things better” — parts involving, say, self-control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. “We’ve likened it to doing a cartwheel. Once you ‘get’ how to do it, it’s not a lot of effort, because your body is working and moving all together.” Train someone to control and direct their eye movements, and you train them to control and direct their attention. “Some of the kids in the initial study were of driving age, and afterwards, they said they could ‘see better’ when they were driving. It’s not that their vision was better, it’s that they were able to attend to more things.” In a more academic setting, that might mean being able to keep the mathematical order of operations in mind even as you focus on a particular problem.

The Arcade trains eye movements by using the eye tracker to turn your gaze into your game controller. “One child said it was like having superpowers,” says Coleman, and it’s not hard to see why. Consider Shroomdigger. All you have to do is spot the mushrooms scattered about a crowded landscape and stare at them steadily. As you stare, they shrink and eventually disappear. Focus improves. Distractibility decreases. And you’re making things disappear with just your eyes. (Of course, it’s not quite a superpower; for one thing, you have to train. “At the outset, kids may get tired in 10 minutes,” notes Coleman.)

“The initial research was funded by the National Institutes of Health,” concludes Coleman. “Fully 23 of the 23 kids who finished the study saw benefits. That’s very unusual in a human study, and that’s what motivated my co-founders.”

Comments
Sponsored

The latest copy of the Reader

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

San Diego Holiday Experiences

As soon as Halloween is over, it's Christmas time in my mind
Next Article

Mang Tomas, banana ketchup barred in San Diego

What will happen to Filipino Christmas here?
Comments
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed Big Screen — Movie commentary Blurt — Music's inside track Booze News — San Diego spirits Classical Music — Immortal beauty Classifieds — Free and easy Cover Stories — Front-page features Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts Feast! — Food & drink reviews Feature Stories — Local news & stories Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore From the Archives — Spotlight on the past Golden Dreams — Talk of the town The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it Letters — Our inbox Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news News Ticker — News & politics Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated Poetry — The old and the new Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers Reading — The hunt for intellectuals Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds SD on the QT — Almost factual news Sheep and Goats — Places of worship Special Issues — The best of Street Style — San Diego streets have style Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves Theater — On stage in San Diego this week Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads Your Week — Daily event picks
4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
Close

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

This Week’s Reader This Week’s Reader