[FeepingCreature]

Important note!

> Another potential confounding factor concerns the imbalanced number of times each group switched video games. Participants switched games every 15 min, according to the clocks they were given, so participants in the fast clock group switched more frequently than participants in other groups. One might propose that the increased switching in the fast clock group might have led to greater activity and exertion, causing blood glucose to decline more rapidly. The switching process entailed loading up a different video game on a computer, which is not a particularly demanding task. Even so, we controlled for this, to a degree, by instructing participants to alert the experimenters when it was time to change games, at which point the experimenters performed the actual switching. No actual effort was required of participants to make the change, aside from alerting the experimenter. It seems implausible that the effort required to signal the experimenter at switching times could have played a significant role in the intergroup differences observed.

They did not switch every 15 minutes! They switched every 15 fake minutes, ie. every 7 minutes in the fast group and every 30 minutes in the slow group. The paper waves this away, but I suspect that getting used to a new game takes more energy than they realize.

A way to test this would be by varying the time that the last game is played, in order to measure blood sugar change during beginning or end of a play phase. If this is correct, consumption should be bigger at the start and lesser at the end of each phase, regardless of how long it actually is.

[notahacker]

The study suggests the context switching shouldnt have had much effect as the control group (who switched 6 times) had BGL decrease consistent with normal rest (so by extension those who switched only 3 times must have had lower than normal rates of BGL decrease at rest over the real life 90 minutes, which is potentially the most interesting part of the correlation they found)

They also claim no effect on subjective reported stress level (but those who switched more times did report more stress, just not to a statistically significant degree...)

Although the games were reportedly "easy" I do think it'd be interesting to see whether there were any meaningful differences in the approaches to the game and levels of performance of the different cohorts. And if they performed similarly but those on a slower "subjective timescale" received vastly more "reward" indicators like higher scores, "you wins" or proportions of a grid/map ticked off because they played each game for longer, that would also be a confounding factor