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The science behind: Lost in Migration

More than just a game

Lost in Migration is more than just a game: it’s based on a fundamental insight about vision and attention that gave psychologists and neuroscientists an important new tool for measuring and understanding attention.

A scientist’s insight: 1974

Psychologist Charles Eriksen didn’t fit the academic stereotype of the 1970s: he wore cowboy boots, enjoyed darts, and played practical jokes on his fellow professors. But Eriksen noticed something fascinating about a common visual attention task being used at the time.

In this original attention task, people were asked to identify one target letter out of a ring of other distractor letters. Eriksen noticed that the smaller the distance between the target and distractors, the slower people responded.

Sound familiar? In Lost in Migration, your goal is to focus on the center bird. But you can't let yourself get distracted by the surrounding flock of birds.

The invention of the Flanker task

Eriksen used his observations to develop a new attention test called the Flanker Task. In this new task, the target letter, instead of appearing in a ring of other letters, was surrounded by either identical or different letters. Once again, participants took longer to respond when the target letter was different from surrounding ones.

The Flanker Task requires that participants suppress their impulse to pay attention to distractors and focus only on the target — this challenges selective attention.

Ever since Eriksen’s research in the 1970s, the Flanker Task has been used extensively among psychologists. It’s been used to evaluate many different aspects of attention, and it inspired our scientists and game designers to create Lost in Migration. We’ve made some key changes: for example, we used birds rather than letters so that members who speak any language can enjoy the game.

What would Eriksen think?

We've now had over 40 million people play Lost in Migration — something that Charles Eriksen would never have dreamed of — and we see this Flanker effect in action every time somebody plays: when the center bird and the surrounding birds point in different directions, people are reliably slower to respond. We've created a personalized Insight that lets you see how much the distractors (aka ‘flankers’) are taxing your attention and slowing you down.

What's more, Lost in Migration results have now been used by researchers at UCSF and the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to understand the impact of sleep on performance!

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A scientist, a task, a game