Interview with Dr. Adam Hampshire

Dr. Adam Hampshire undertook his degree and PhD at King's College Cambridge. He now is Principle Investigator at the Computational, Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory at Imperial College London and is a Dementia Research Institute Investigator. His lab conducts research at the interface between medicine, psychology, neuroscience, engineering and AI. With a strong interest in understanding the nature and brain basis of human intelligence, Dr Hampshire is author on ~80 research articles including in top tier journals Nature, Science, Neuron and Nature Communications. The intelligence testing games that he developed have been used to assess hundreds of thousands of people and are used in research around the globe.

Please explain your role in The Family Brain Games?
I was approached to help with the Family Brain Games because my lab at Imperial College London work at the cutting edge of research into human behaviour and its basis in the human brain. During the design of the show I advised on the different dimensions of human intelligence and how we can measure them. I then provided cognitive tests during recruitment of participants, developed by my lab, which the general public can use here: Cognitron.co.uk.

These were used to ensure that the families taking part would be able to cope with the challenges they would face during gameplay on the show. I also helped develop the games that the families play on the actual show. Finally, my team and I were on set throughout filming, generating predictions for who would win each challenge, and helping to analyse/interpret the gameplay.

What attracted you most to this project?
Several things grasped my imagination when I was first contacted about this project. Although IQ tests are very useful, seeking to fit everyone onto just one linear scale is a massive oversimplification. There are all sorts of different ways that a person can be intelligent. Some people have great memory skills. Others are highly focused. Yet others seem to be able to juggle multiple tasks, or plan ahead. In fact, a team might operate best if its members have different complementary strengths, and we know that these strengths relate to different systems in the human brain. This diversity is lost if you reduce everyone down to a single scale.

The idea of communicating to the general public that human intelligence is complex grasped my imagination. Showing that most people are good at something, and that we can solve pretty much anything if we put our minds together seems like a much more positive message. It also is more scientifically accurate.

I also was keen on the potential to raise the profile of the sort of citizen science research projects that we run. The experiments on our Cognitron.co.uk website are investigating things like memory and social-emotional intelligence, and how this develops through the lifespan. These projects are important as they help us to also understand how that development can go wrong. These projects rely on members of the general public volunteering their time, so hopefully people who see the show will be motivated to go onto the website and take part.

Can you describe a couple of the games we can expect to see?
Yes, in a game called Eight Things the participants have to commit the objects to memory as quickly as they can. Once they think that they have them all in memory, they buzz and then have to recall all of them as quickly and accurately as they can. We know that pressure causes anxiety which destabilises 'working memory' - that is, the type of memory that we use to hold things actively in mind for short periods of time. Therefore there is a good chance that they will forget the objects faster than they expect to, once they press the buzzer.

Another game involves the families working together to construct a 3D shape from sets of blocks. The twist is that only one family member can see the shape that they are trying to make, and they cannot see the sets of blocks that are being used to make that shape.

This means that they have to be able to communicate with each other effectively so that they can visualise the shapes in their imagination, what we refer to as the 'mind’s eye'. This is a very difficult task - as you will see, some families solve this very rapidly, as they communicate logically and efficiently. Others cannot solve it at all.

What was your process behind designing them?
We started by identifying tasks from our Cognitron.co.uk website that we know, based on the data, measure different aspects of human intelligence. With a team of game show designers, these tasks were then further developed and supersized for the show. The cooperative and competitive play elements that were necessary to measure team play, that is, 'collective intelligence', were added. This required the experience of the gameshow designers as they have a great deal of experience in developing cooperative play games.

What are the games designed to measure in this series?
Based on my labs previous analysis of more than 100,000 members of the general public who have used the Cognitron website, we know that tasks such as object-memory, mental rotation and spatial planning tap different aspects of human intelligence. Furthermore, based on our functional brain imaging research, we know that these tasks are processed by different areas of the human brain. Therefore, the games were designed based on scientific research to measure as broad a set of human cognitive faculties as possible. Additionally, by adding the cooperative and competitive game-play elements, we also examined collective intelligence and the ability to stay focused under pressure.

Tell us a bit about collective intelligence and how does this change as we age?
Collective intelligence refers to the ability for groups of people to work together in order to perform tasks or solve problems. Interestingly, it has been shown that the sum of intelligences of the members of a team, eg as measured by IQ, predicts their group performance, that is, their collectible intelligence, poorly.

Collective intelligence is itself likely to be rather complex. To work well in a team, one needs not only to be able to communicate effectively - which requires having insight into what other people know, how to influence their thinking, when to broadcast that which one knows oneself - but also how to listen to others and encourage them to be brave and volunteer ideas. It is not well understood how this complex ability varies through the lifespan. I think that this is an important thing to understand.

What did you find was most fascinating, once you saw each game being played out?
I found a lot of what we saw really very interesting. In one episode, a family member was trying to communicate a complex 3D shape so that others could imagine it in their minds eye. They started by providing the overall dimensions of the shape, then filling it in. By setting the bounds for the object to be imagined in this manner they grasped this game, which other families had struggled to do. This was very clever as it required that the communicator had a deep insight into what it would be like to be the person who was on the receiving end of the communication - we refer to such abilities as 'theory of mind' - that is, our own understanding of what is in other peoples' minds and how we can influence that.

What kind of family dynamics did you observe?
It was interesting to see how parents sometimes would hold back as they wanted their children to be the ones who gave the correct answer. They were encouraging them to learn that they can solve these difficult games, and to learn how to win. Conversely, there were a few situations where you could see that the child arrived at the answer to a difficult problem well before everyone else, but it took a while for the parents to realise that this was the case. This speaks to the plasticity of the young brain, which is able to learn new things with great rapidity.

In addition to the above, it also was interesting to see how the family members supported each other in between the game play. The games were challenging and could be quite high-pressure emotionally. In some cases, when they could support each other emotionally, they were able to bounce back from defeat.

What makes a person ‘intelligent’ in your opinion?
To answer this one must first define what intelligence is, which in turn is a controversial question! If one defines intelligence as the ability to solve challenging problems, learn rapidly and behave in an efficient and adaptive manner, then I would say that there are a variety of things that can make someone intelligent. 

This varies substantially from one person to another. Memory, attention, logic, lateral thinking, cognitive flexibility, the ability to plan ahead, control ones impulses and communicate effectively. Also the ability to apply such faculties not just in a contrived test, but when out in the real world. If one can excel in some sub-set of abilities, and find the correct niche that utilises those abilities, then I think that one can succeed in everyday life.

Tell us about your wider work and research to date and how have IQ tests developed over time?
My research seeks to understand what the different dimensions of the human mind are, and how they vary in the general population. I also refer to the underlying organisation of the human brain. Different areas of the brain are involved in different types of task. My team has been working to develop tasks that measure the aspects of human intelligence that have their basis in those different areas of the brain. My primary motivation is to develop diagnostic tools for clinical applications, for example, sub-classifying complex populations such as people who have brain injuries or age-related neurodegenerative disorders.

Armed with such tools, we can better predict how each individual's symptoms will develop in the future, and how we can treat their unique profile of cognitive problems. I take a truly interdisciplinary approach to this problem. For example, my lab currently includes people from psychology, neuroscience, physics, engineering and data scientist backgrounds. There are people with very different abilities all working together to solve this great challenge!

Tell us about your ‘Cognitron’ test - how can people take part in this at home?
We are currently running a set of citizen science studies on our Cognitron website. Taking part is easy and fun. Go to:

https://braingames.cognitron.co.uk/ 

You can then play a series of cognitive games, taking approximately 20 minutes. The site will then show you how you performed relative to the general population. This is cutting-edge research investigating how aspects of human intelligence vary through the lifespan.

The website has been developed with support from the European Commission, the Dementia Research Institute and the National Institute of Health Research. By taking part, you can learn what your greatest cognitive strengths are and have a real impact by helping with our research. The site has interesting facts about the brain science underlying the games and strategies for improving. You can practice and try to improve relative to your previous scores. We also include links to other ongoing studies that seek to improve things like anxiety, depression and memory through online training regimes, all of which are free to take part in.

Related Programme Information

• Episode one
• Episode two
• Episode three
• Episode four