Ian J Lewis

• University of Tasmania

Standard, well-established cognitive tasks that produce reliable effects in group comparisons also lead to unreliable measurement when assessing individual differences. This reliability paradox has been demonstrated in decision-conflict tasks such as the Simon, Flanker, and Stroop tasks, which measure various aspects of cognitive control. We aim to...

Standard, well-established cognitive tasks that produce reliable effects in group comparisons also lead to unreliable measurement when assessing individual differences. This reliability paradox has been demonstrated in decision-conflict tasks such as the Simon, Flanker, and Stroop tasks, which measure various aspects of cognitive control. We aim to...

Is engaging with gambling-like video game rewards a risk factor for future gambling? Despite speculation, there are no direct experimental tests of this “gateway hypothesis”. We test a mechanism that might support this pathway: the effects of engaging with gambling-like reward mechanisms on risk-taking. We tested the hypothesis that players exposed...

Background To overcome the high failure rate of gameful interventions, we need to better understand their design and evaluation strategies to build an evidence-base for best-practice approaches that bring about meaningful change. This systematic review asks: ‘What behavioural and technological design and evaluation theories and approaches are appli...

Over the last few years, it has become accepted that reliable measurement of individual cognitive abilities requires participants to complete many more trials and/or to use tasks with larger effect sizes than are typical of existing cognitive batteries. This project develops a battery of cognitive control tests enabling efficient and reliable measu...

Smartphone apps have emerged as valuable research tools to sample human behaviours at their time of occurrence within natural environments. Human behaviour sampling methods, such as Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), aim to facilitate research that is situated in ecologically valid real world environments rather than laboratory environments. Re...

Purpose Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) exhibit limited understanding of their business processes. This lack of understanding limits the potential of these businesses and is a direct contributor to the high failure rates of this sector of the economy. Research has suggested that existing BP methods to not support SMEs in gaining an impro...

Mobile health (mHealth) behavioural interventions have increasingly recognised the importance of integrating evidence supported behaviour change techniques and user centred design feedback. This paper presents a mHealth intervention design process that systematically integrates these criteria in the context of designing a novel app to modify snacki...

Engaging people in exercise is vital for the health of the population. Health issues such as obesity are significant ongoing concerns for governments and society across the world, which can be improved through increasing the exercise activities of the population. The problem of lack of motivation for and engagement in exercise is well known, and so...

Background: Smoking is recognized as the largest, single, preventable cause of death and disease in the developed world. While the majority of smokers report wanting to quit, and many try each year, smokers find it difficult to maintain long-term abstinence. Behavioral support, such as education, advice, goal-setting, and encouragement, is known to...

Violence is a key element in video games and despite the extensive research in video game violence, there is still a debate on its psychophysiological effect. There is a lack of understanding on the elements of video game violence that influence aggression. The present pilot study examines the effect of blood and gore in a first-person shooter with...

Achievements are a common feature of modern video games. Early research efforts have attempted to classify achievements into taxonomies in order to identify achievement types and to learn about their potential affect on players, however, these studies have been constrained by small, manually collected samples of player data. This study describes a...

Game jams are social events involving the integration of enthusiasts from various game making disciplines (e.g. programming, art, design) to make games under constraints, such as a short fixed time (Goddard et al. 2014) and a common theme (Fowler et al 2013). Research on game jams has suggested that they have the potential to provide an effective a...

Existing energy conservation interventions provide feedback in the form of graphs and numbers. There is a need for more persuasive and theoretically informed interventions in order to bring about a greater conservation effect. Using the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) systematic method of intervention design, we designed a mobile phone game which uses...

Gamified learning systems are becoming increasingly common within educational institutions, however there is a lack of understanding on the elements of gamification that influence, either positively or negatively, the learning experiences of students using these systems. This study examines an existing gamified learning tool implemented within an A...

Viewshed analysis is an important tool in the study of digital terrain visibility. Current methods rely on the CPU performing computations to linearly calculate visibility for a given position on a portion of digital terrain. The viewshed analysis process can be sped up through the use of a GPU to parallelize the visibility algorithms. This paper p...

We demonstrate the unsuitability of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to the game of Tetris and show that their great strength, namely, their ability of generalization, is the ultimate cause. This work describes a variety of attempts at applying the Supervised Learning approach to Tetris and demonstrates that these approaches (resoundedly) fail to...

Within existing ICT degrees there is a widely-held belief that content must be tailored for different ‘kinds’ of students — often two differing student groups: a technical group requiring detailed Computer Science knowledge and a separate group requiring less technical, more strategic ICT knowledge and skills. Our institution has produced a combine...

Social Networking Services (SNSs) have become a powerful and ubiquitous form of social software with applications in a wide range of fields. Modern SNSs such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter provide functionality for developers to integrate social features into their applications. Game developers have used this to produce highly popular social gam...

Achievement Systems are inextricably tied to the largest gaming service platforms in the world currently. The current literature suggests that Achievements act as extrinsic motivators and grant players new challenges and goals in games. However, prevalent models of motivation report that extrinsic motivation undermines intrinsic interest in a task....

While the importance of Achievements has been recognized by the videogames industry and players as contributors to both player motivation and game selection, little attention has been paid to them by the academic community. There exists a need to better understand Achievements and the opportunities they offer as there is an absence of research into...

Achievements and Achievement systems are recognized as important elements to increasing the profitability and success of games titles. Achievements can influence a player's buying decisions and can even increase a player's motivation to continue playing a game. Despite their growing importance to game players, designers, and promoters, little atten...

In the current University economic environment, ICT Schools are under pressure to reduce the scope of their offerings and to simultaneously increase research output. The UTAS School of Computing and Information Systems was recently administratively reviewed and it was recommended to replace the current undergraduate degrees, a Bachelor of Computing...

This paper introduces a flexible parser that is capable of parsing any context-free grammars — even ambiguous ones. The parser is capable of arbitrary speculation and will consider all possible parses. This general parser is of particular use for the parsing of extensible languages as it allows macro programmers to forget about parsing, and concent...

Background Despite treatment with highdose myeloblative chemotherapy and peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) rescue, a high proportion of children with neuroblastoma relapse and die. Re-infusion of PBSC contaminated with tumour at the time of autologous transplantation may play a significant role in this relapse. In this study the frequency of tumour...

Background Despite treatment with highdose myeloblative chemotherapy and peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) rescue, a high proportion of children with neuroblastoma relapse and die. Re‐infusion of PBSC contaminated with tumour at the time of autologous transplantation may play a significant role in this relapse. In this study the frequency of tumour...