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During my year of study at Rubika France (2016) I joined a team of 5 to participate in the Imagine Cup game development competition. For its first phase we had to submit a PowerPoint presentation for a concept we wished to build from in the next phases. We called ours "Beasts". The team was composed of two designers, two game artists and one game programmer. My main responsibility was the level design.

Cognitivism

Is a approach that considers the complex physiological structure of people when absorbing a variety of stimuli from their environment. In other words it is interested in the different layers of mental processes in which information goes through to provoke change, to provoke learning. It gained in popularity around the 1950's and 60's partly as a response of the inability of behaviorism to examine the mechanisms of the brain. Moreover the technological revolution came with much more precise data through neuroscience, mental processes were not inferred from behavioral observations anymore. Last but not least it allowed a few pioneers to think the brain as a sort of information processor.

Over the years cognitivists have proposed a large amount of learning best practices that align with the strenghts and limitations of human cognition shown by the experiments, models and theories produced by the many fields of cognitive sciences.

Here is a list of some of the most robust and / or popular ones, accompanied with some of my personal favorites :

Perception :
- Gestalt laws of perception
- Weber-Fechner law

Memory :
- Multistore model (Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968)
  - Multicomponent model of working memory (Baddely and Hitch 1974)
  - Cognitive load theory (John Sweller 1988)
  - Levels of processing model (Craik and Lockhart 1972)
  - New disuse theory (Bjork and Bjork 1992)
  - Eyewitness testimony (Loftus and Palmer 1974)

Attention :
- "Cocktail party effect" (Cherry 1953)
- "Inattentional blindness" (Simons & Levins 1998)

Motivation :
- (Lieury 2015)
- Overjustification effect (Amabile 1996)
- Autodetermination theory (Deci 1975)

Emotions :
- Somatic markers theory (Damasio 1991)
- Two-factor theory of emotion (Schachter and Singer 1962)
- The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life (Ledoux 1996)

Decision-making :
- Gut feelings : The intelligence of the unconscious (Gerd Gigerenzer 2007)

Implementation examples

To show the relevance of these principles I don't think there is a better example than the growth of the field of User Experience (UX). The discipline focuses on applying cognitive sciences principles and approaches where they are needed, often where they are humans involved, well, everywhere. It was birthed in the 1980's but it already touches every industry in some form or the other and it keeps getting better and bigger. The best practices it develops to facilitate learning are to me, the cutting edge of cognitivism.

For game UX I cannot recommend The gamer's brain enough, it was written by Celia Hodent and published in 2017. She is a specialist who worked on some of the biggest productions of the last decade. The book is filled with explanations of these theories and ways they can be applied to game development.

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