I desire to know what this is. And how you came to be interested in this field of study.

Cognitive Neuroscience is a merge between Psychology and Neuroscience. Some topics that are studied in this field include unconsciousness, visual illusions, and cognitive biases.

I became interested in the field when I took an undergraduate course in visual illusions and learned how illusions can reveal the many 'shortcuts' your brain takes to reveal your perception of the world. As a life-time video gamer, I started to make connections between Psychology and Neuroscience and how they could improve video game design. In fact, a scholarship during my PhD from Penny Arcade helped me transition from the academic sciences to the gaming industry.

For example, did you know that negative events carry more weight in your memories? This is known as negativity bias and is part of the reason players say things such as, "All of my games have been terribly lopsided lately" or "I get leavers in almost every single game." Being the imperfect beings we are, we give more weight to negative events like lopsided games or leavers and it makes it seem like they are far more frequent. However, knowing these biases... we can start to combat them to give our players a more enjoyable experience--sometimes without even changing the game itself.

now reinterpret this to explain elo hell for everyone :>

simple terms...if you get 1 bad game you will forget the other 4 decent games and/or 2 great games.

Yup.

Just like people only remember one bad weather forecast and not the good ones. Jerks.

P.S. I have taken some neuropsych classes and just curious.. does visual stimuli for location in a game stimulate the dorsal and ventral pathways in the brain? I can't remember which was which but I'm guessing the "what" pathway is stimulated but not the "where" -- Like if someone pings bot does the "where" pathway handle the 'processing'

ELO Hell is a place that your cognition takes you!

Lyte, can someone with an undergraduate degree in experiment psychology land a position in the gaming industry doing some type of user studying or something similar?

Interesting. I've always had a passion for psychology, growing up around it pretty much my entire life. Cognitive bias though has always been a personal favored topic. Self-serving bias and it's applications to online gaming has been a huge point of interest in the last few years.

Self-serving bias for those who don't know is the tendency to attribute one's own successes to internal stuffs (I won because I'm just skilled) and their losses to situations (My support sucked or I just woke up, so of course I'm not playing my best). It also covers the tendency to attribute other people's successes to circumstance (Ahri is just op, takes no real skill) while attributing their failures to internal causes (You suck noob)

When I was picking my degree (ward of the state means no co-signer for loans, etc, just a pell grant. I had to be rather careful with my degree choice, I don't get a second chance) I actually was fighting between a video game oriented field, or something more focused around psychology, but eventually settled with computer information systems simply in the hopes that a general area of study would help me secure employment somewhere, where I could then go back and specialize in the unforeseeable future. Would have been nice to know that there were areas where psychology and gaming meet in a career respect.

I have a psychology degree, and people seem to think that means I want to hear and fix their problems. Once I explain Cognitive bias and cognitive dissonance to them, it's like I've literally opened a door they never saw and they usually are much better for it.

Except for the people who see the door, slam it, and completely refuse to acknowledge there is anything wrong with them.