The Great Brain Experiment

A team of neuroscientists from the Wellcome Trust Centre of Neuroimaging  in the UK used Wellcome Trust funding to create a smartphone app that allows people to play games while contributing to science. The Great Brain Experiment has shown that mobile apps could be a useful source of data collection. The idea is to take the psychology experiments done every day in the lab and turn them into mobile games.

The results published demonstrate that the games reproduced established laboratory findings related to short-term memory, decision-making, inhibition and perception, despite not being conducted in the controlled environment of the laboratory.

A year after the launch of  the free app, the findings and data from over 60,000 people have been returned and this week the initial findings have been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.