NEW Insight: Lost in Migration

Have you visited the Lumosity Insights tab recently? Today, we launched a brand new Insight for Lost in Migration. The Insight takes a closer look at how you filter information, providing an analysis of how distracting information affects your performance on the game.

Lost in Migration is one of the first games we developed for Lumosity users. We based the game on psychologist Charles Eriksen’s classic Flanker task. The Flanker task asks you to view a “target” letter, for instance the letter “A,” surrounded by other letters. Sometimes the surrounding letters are also all A, while other times the surrounding letters are different — maybe B and Z and D or some other combination. The goal is to correctly identify the target without getting distracted by the surrounding letters. In Lost in Migration, we updated the task by changing the letters into a flock of birds. The target bird points in one direction and, as in the Flanker Test, is surrounded by birds that either match the target’s direction or do not. Here, your job is to identify which direction the target bird is pointing. This challenges selective attention, or your ability to suppress the impulse to pay attention to distractors and focus only on the target.

In developing an Insight for Lost in Migration, we observed that people tend to fall into one of three categories when dealing with matching versus non-matching flocks. There are adaptive players, who tend to slow down for non-matching flocks to focus on accuracy; balanced players typically slow down just a little to stay accurate; and steady players maintain an even pace whether the flock is matching or non-matching. The new Lost in Migration Insight will analyze your individual gameplay to determine which type of player you are.

Additionally, the Lost in Migration Insight will let you know how quickly you respond to matching versus non-matching flocks, as well as how you compare to people your age. From these analyses, you’ll be able to determine what — if any — tweaks you can make while playing to boost your score.

The new Lost in Migration Insight is our fifth Insight since launching the feature in November, joining Game Strengths, Monthly Gains and Drops, a speed versus accuracy analysis for Ebb and Flow, and a planning analysis for Train of Thought. We’re committed to providing personalized, actionable analyses to our users so they can make the most of their Lumosity experience. Insights are currently exclusively available to subscribers. Find them in the Insights tab on lumosity.com or in our iOS and Android apps.