Two Views are Better than One: Epistemic Actions May Prime

Epistemic actions are physical actions people take more to simplify their internal problem-solving processes than to bring themselves closer to an external goal state. In the video game Tetris, for instance, players routinely over-rotate falling shapes, presumably to make recognition or placement decisions faster or less error-prone. Along these lines, an experimental study was performed to test the hypothesis that it is easier to recognize a two-dimensional shape if it is presented in two different orientations than if it is presented in only one. In particular, we tested whether performance on a shape-based video game task was facilitated by multiple views of a shape, and whether game performance (an indirect test of memory) differed from a direct test of memory for previously presented shapes. Results show that indeed task performance is both faster and more accurate when participants see two views of a shape than when they see one, but that more than two views do not improve performance further. In addition, multiple views lead to faster performance on the video game than on the memory test, but only in the earliest stages of training. We conclude that Tetris players may rotate falling shapes manually to see the shapes in more than one orientation, which leads to faster and more accurate placement