Project Azriel

Project Azriel is a first-person shooter in which you fight zombies while completing brain-training activities. Its three cognitive training tasks target working-memory updating, mental-set switching and attentional inhibition. The game includes adaptive training and gameplay difficulty, and lets you replay missions or the whole campaign while retaining your experience points and difficulty level.

Gameplay features

You can switch between first- and third-person cameras, and the player camera has adaptive depth of field. The game’s brain-training tasks are integrated into the action.

Research and study

Project Azriel was developed through five years of research and development sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. A randomized, blinded study involving more than 165 subjects evaluated its effects on cognitive transfer measures. Both the experimental and control groups improved on fluid-intelligence tests between pretest and posttest, while the experimental group improved significantly more; the study reported a significant interaction between test timing and experimental condition (F(1, 124) = 7.19, p < .01, η2 = .06).