Psychology and the social sciences are undergoing a revolution: It has become increasingly clear that traditional lab-based experiments fail to capture the full range of  differences in cognitive abilities and behaviours across the general population. Some progress has been made toward devising measures that can be applied at scale across individuals and populations. What has been missing is a broad battery of validated tasks that can be easily deployed, used across different age ranges and social backgrounds, and employed in practical, clinical, and research contexts. Here, we present Skill Lab, a game-based approach allowing the efficient assessment of a suite of cognitive abilities. Skill Lab has been validated outside the lab in a crowdsourced population-size sample recruited in collaboration with the Danish Broadcast Company (Danmarks Radio, DR). Our game-based measures are five times faster to complete than the equivalent traditional measures and replicate previous findings on the decline of cognitive abilities with age in a large  population sample. Furthermore, by combining the game data with an in-game survey, we demonstrate that this unique dataset has implication for key questions in social science, challenging the Jack-of-all-Trades theory of entrepreneurship and provide evidence for risk preference being independent of executive functioning .
Psychology and the social sciences are undergoing a revolution: It has become increasingly clear that traditional lab-based experiments are challenged in capturing the full range of individual differences in cognitive abilities and behaviors across the general population. Some progress has been made toward devising measures that can be applied at scale across individuals and populations. What has been missing is a broad battery of validated tasks that can be easily deployed, used across different age ranges and social backgrounds, and in practical, clinical, and research contexts. Here, we present Skill Lab, a game-based approach affording efficient assessment of a suite of cognitive abilities. Skill Lab has been validated outside the lab in a crowdsourced broad and diverse sample, recruited in collaboration with the Danish Broadcast Company (Danmarks Radio, DR). Our game-based measures are five times faster to complete than the equivalent traditional measures and replicate previous findings on the decline of cognitive abilities with age in a large cross-sectional population sample. Finally, we provide a large open-access dataset that enables continued improvements on our work .
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fail to capture
are challenged in capturing
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individual
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behaviours
behaviors
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employed
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allowing the
affording
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population-size sample
broad and diverse sample,
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cross-sectional
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Furthermore, by combining the game data with an in-game survey, we demonstrate that this unique dataset has implication for key questions in social science, challenging the Jack-of-all-Trades theory of entrepreneurship and provide evidence for risk preference being independent of executive functioning
Finally, we provide a large open-access dataset that enables continued improvements on our work