Posts

Hello, my name is Shannon. This PhD research project aims to understand and evaluate the effects of different video game genres on frequent gamers cognitive abilities. This will be a multi-year study with 3 main phases of research, conducted during the first semester of the University term. The research focuses on these genres: First-Person Shooter, Puzzle, Real-Time Strategy, Role-Playing Game, and a Control. Participants, who are university students who play games for over 5hrs a week, will be assessed over a 10 week period to see how these games affect their attention, ability to switch tasks and memory span. ...

Hi everyone, I received notification about the papers today. The paper on game genre was not accepted, I was provided some valuable feedback and am confident that when it has been revised according to this, it will be accepted at the next venue. The other paper I prepared with my co-researchers was accepted, and we will be working on polishing that for final submission next week. Myself and Christianna will be attending the conference in November in London. For now, my focus will be on implementing the feedback from my transfer before I attempt to resubmit the rejected paper elsewhere.

I completed my transfer yesterday. This is a meeting with objective university staff members who must review my progress thus far in my PhD to assess whether they believe I can complete it to an appropriate standard in time for the end. For this I had to write up a detailed account of all the work I had done, expected future work, as well as my plan for how it will be completed and what I expect to contribute. ...

I have submitted a revised version of the research paper to this years BRITCHI Conference as a short paper (4-6 pages). I am optimistic this will be accepted, as my prior submission to last years Doctoral Consortium was accepted and published. (https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/BCSHCI2025.37). Myself and fellow researchers Christianna Owen (formerly Petrichou) and Jonathan Edwards have submitted another short paper based on some research we conducted last May, focusing on the impact of robot facilitation and game challenge on player enjoyment. ...

Sorry for the long delay in posting, but myself and my supervisor Janet have been preparing the next phase of my research which is very exciting! I will share more information in due course. For now, I have also been assisting my other supervisor Jamin in some research around the impact of gamification in kids learning. We had around 120 children from primary schools visit the university, and I assisted with administering his research study. I believe Jamin gathered some interesting results. I have my transfer coming up soon so have been working on that too.

This week a poster I created about the genre study has been on display in Foster Building as part of the Postgraduate Research Conference. Please follow the link below to take a look at the poster. https://s3.shannonbarrett.me/posters/PGR-Conference-Shannon-Barrett.pdf

Hello all, While this is not the best news I would like to share it because it is important to the research, and it allows me to grow as a researcher, I submitted a full research paper (20 pages) to CHI PLAY 2026, a prestigious Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference and it was rejected. I was provided with thorough feedback which will allow me to readjust my paper and prepare it for submission elsewhere. ...

Hi everyone, So far I have analysed the results of the research study and I am proud to say that we have some early evidence that there was a genre-based cognitive skill change, and that some specific genres performed better than others. Almost all genres consistently performed better than the Control group. However the emotional data did not seem to really have a significant effect. Time to work on preparing the data for publication.

Thank you for taking the time to participate in this research, overall there were 25 participants who completed at least one session, and 11 who completed all sessions. I will be spending the next few months analysing the data and preparing a paper to be published, as well as enjoying Christmas, and deciding next steps for my research. I will keep you up to date once I have something to share.

Hi everyone, I am happy to say I am now accepting participants for the first study, we are ideally looking for around 50, so if you’re interested please get involved. Participants will need to be available for 10 weekly sessions between 29th September and 12th December 2025. Participants need to be available for one session a week lasting approximately 90 minutes each. If you are interested please review the information sheet, download and complete the Consent Form provided (you will need your ULAN email) and return it to this email: sbarrett6@lancashire.ac.uk then complete the survey: Call for Participation Survey (Microsoft Forms) ...