It’s no surprise that many Lumosity members tell us that Lost in Migration is one of their favorite exercises: it’s easy to learn, exciting to play, and can improve your concentration skills. But like all our games, Lost in Migration is more than just a game: it origins are steeped in an exciting research breakthrough that gave psychologists and neuroscientists an important new tool for studying attention.
Charles Eriksen (or “Erik” as he was known to his colleagues) certainly did not fit the academic stereotype of the 1970s: he wore cowboy boots, enjoyed darts, and played practical jokes on his fellow professors. But Erik had noticed something fascinating about a visual attention task in which subjects identified one target letter out of a ring of other letters.
In this original task, subjects were asked to indicate what letter had appeared at the 9-o’clock position among a ring of other numbers by moving a lever in one of two directions. Some letters required a pull to one direction, while others required the subject to pull the lever in the opposite direction. The closer a distractor letter (as opposed to the same letter or another letter that required the same direction of lever pull) was to a target in the ring, the longer it took the subject to respond.
Does this sound similar? In Lost in Migration, the goal is to train your ability to focus on the center bird. But you can’t let yourself get distracted by the directionality of similar surrounding birds.
After noting this fact, Eriksen went on to develop a new type of attention test very similar to the one you’ll encounter in Lost in Migration. In this new “flanker” task, the target letter, instead of appearing on a ring of other letters, was surrounded by either identical or different letters. Once again, subjects took longer to respond when the target letter was different from surrounding ones.
Erik pointed out that this phenomenon of response competition had been previously identified in psychology in an exercise known as the Stroop Task. (You can try Color Match for a great example of the classic Stroop task.)
Ever since Eriksen’s research in the 1970s, flanker tasks have enjoyed extensive use among psychologists. They’ve been used to evaluate different aspects of attention, making them a perfect choice when our neuroscientists needed a foundation for Lost in Migration. We’ve made some key changes: for example, we used birds rather than letter so that members with less experience with roman characters (A, E, O, U, etc) are not at a disadvantage in the task.
Now that you know a bit more about the history behind Lost in Migration, why not give it a play? It can help you avoid distractions and concentrate better—skills you might use to tackle tough problems at work or at home. Once you’ve mastered this game, consider challenging yourself with some of our other attention games!
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