Tetris effect - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Tetris effect occurs when people devote sufficient time and attention to an activity that it begins to overshadow their thought

Thought

"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...

s, mental image

Mental image

A mental image is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of perceiving some object, event, or scene, but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses...

s, and dream

Dream

Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not definitively understood, though they have been a topic of scientific speculation, philosophical intrigue and religious...

s. It is named after the video game Tetris
Tetris
Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...

.

People who play Tetris for a prolonged amount of time may then find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a street. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of habit

Habit (psychology)

Habits are routines of behavior that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously. Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks...

. They might also dream about falling Tetris shapes when drifting off to sleep or see images of falling Tetris shapes at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hallucination

Hallucination

A hallucination, in the broadest sense of the word, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid,...

or hypnagogic imagery.

Other examples

The Tetris effect can occur with other video games, with any prolonged visual task (such as classifying cells on microscope slides, weeding, picking or sorting fruit, flipping burgers, driving long distances, or playing board games such as chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

or go), and in other sensory modalities. In kinesthesis, a person newly on land after spending long periods at sea may move with an unbidden rocking motion, having become accustomed to the ship making such movements (known as sea legs

Illusions of self-motion

Illusions of self-motion occur when one moves or feels one has moved without feeling that one has made the movement. Motions can include movements of the whole body or movements of single limbs...

or mal de debarquement

Mal de debarquement

Mal de debarquement syndrome is a rare condition usually occurring after a cruise, aircraft flight, or other sustained motion event. It has only recently received attention and very little real scientific research has been conducted...

). Computer programmers and developers sometimes have similar experiences, and report dreaming about code when they sleep at night. It also frequently occurs in the water-sport rowing

Sport rowing

Rowing is a sport in which athletes race against each other on rivers, on lakes or on the ocean, depending upon the type of race and the discipline. The boats are propelled by the reaction forces on the oar blades as they are pushed against the water...

Place in memory

Stickgold et al. (2000) have proposed that Tetris imagery is a separate form of memory

Memory

In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....

, likely related to procedural memory

Procedural memory

Procedural memory is memory for how to do things. Procedural memory guides the processes we perform and most frequently resides below the level of conscious awareness. When needed, procedural memories are automatically retrieved and utilized for the execution of the integrated procedures involved...

. This is from their research in which they showed that people with anterograde amnesia

Anterograde amnesia

Anterograde amnesia is a loss of the ability to create new memories after the event that caused the amnesia, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the recent past, while long-term memories from before the event remain intact. This is in contrast to retrograde amnesia, where memories...

, unable to form new declarative memories

Declarative memory

Declarative memory is one of two types of long term human memory. It refers to memories which can be consciously recalled such as facts and knowledge. Its counterpart is known as non-declarative or Procedural memory, which refers to unconscious memories such as skills...

, reported dreaming of falling shapes after playing Tetris during the day, despite not being able to remember playing the game at all.
A recent Oxford study (2009) suggests Tetris-like video games may help prevent the development of traumatic memories. If the video game treatment is played soon after the traumatic event, the preoccupation with Tetris shapes is enough to prevent the mental recitation of traumatic images, thereby decreasing the accuracy, intensity, and frequency of traumatic reminders. "We suggest it specifically interferes with the way sensory memories are laid down in the period after trauma and thus reduces the number of flashbacks that are experienced afterwards," summarizes Dr. Emily Holmes, who led the study.

History of the term

According to Earling (1996), one of the first references to the term is by Garth Kidd in February, 1996. Kidd described "after-images of the game for up to days afterwards" and "a tendency to identify everything in the world as being made of four squares and attempt to determine 'where it fits in'". Kidd attributed the origin of the term to computer-game players from Adelaide

Adelaide

Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia and the fifth-largest city in Australia. Adelaide has an estimated population of more than 1.2 million...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. The earliest description of the phenomenon is in the introduction to Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman

Neil Richard Gaiman born 10 November 1960)is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book...

's SF poem "Virus" (1987) in Digital Dreams. More recently, the term has been used in the book Tetris Mania, describing a seventeen year old named Jason suffering from this phenomenon.

L'effet Tetris

The effet Tetris (French: Tetris effect) is a similarly named, but quite different phenomenon found in evolutionary AI

AI, A.I., Ai, or ai may refer to:- Computers :* Artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science* Ad impression, in online advertising* .ai, the ISO Internet 2-letter country code for Anguilla...

systems related to the concept of bounded rationality

Bounded rationality

Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision...

. The effet Tetris then, is the effect whereby a hasty, but imprecise course of action is better than calculating an optimal move where such a calculation would not be completed in time; in short, evolutionary

Evolutionary computation

In computer science, evolutionary computation is a subfield of artificial intelligence that involves combinatorial optimization problems....

systems often find local rather than global optima.

Game Transfer Phenomena

Modern term created after the thesis wrote by Angelica Ortiz de Gortari student, a student from the Nottigham Trent University. The Game Transfer Phenomena or GTP is the set of residual feelings, thoughts and/or images which remain after playing a videogame. A good example, other than the Tetris effect

Tetris effect

The Tetris effect occurs when people devote sufficient time and attention to an activity that it begins to overshadow their thoughts, mental images, and dreams...

would be the awareness of the absence of a Head-up display

Head-Up Display

A head-up display or heads-up display is any transparent display that presents data without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints...

in the natural human field of view after playing a First-person shooter

First-person shooter

First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...

or the urge to arrange (or command) little objects after playing a strategy game such as Starcraft

StarCraft

StarCraft is a military science fiction real-time strategy video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. The first game of the StarCraft series was released for Microsoft Windows on 31 March 1998. With more than 11 million copies sold worldwide as of February 2009, it is one of the best-selling...

External links

This Is Your Brain on Tetris — Wired magazine, May 1994
Tetris dreams - Scientific American magazine, October 2000