IARPA to Outline Serious Games-Focused Program in February

The United States Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) will host a Proposers' Day Conference on February 24th, 2011, soliciting support for the serious games-promoting Serius Program. The IARPA conference will be held to "provide information on Sirius, to address questions from potential proposers, and to provide a forum for potential proposers to present their capabilities and find potential team partners." Noting that serious games "can have positive experiential-learning transfer to real world skills or behavior changes," IARPA plans to create new training applications addressing cognitive biases. "The research objective is to experimentally manipulate variables in Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and to determine whether and how such variables might enable player-participant recognition and persistent mitigation of cognitive biases," IARPA notes in a press release. "The Program will provide a basis for experimental repeatability and independent validation of effects, and identify critical elements of design for effective analytic training in VLEs. The cognitive biases of interest that will be examined include: (1) Confirmation Bias, (2) Fundamental Attribution Error, (3) Bias Blind Spot, (4) Anchoring Bias, (5) Representativeness Bias, and (6) Projection Bias." Proposers' Day Conference attendees must register by February 17th at the conference's website.