You don’t have to do anything actively to upload you data. As long as you have an internet connection, we will receive your anonymous data plays automatically.

However, if you have not consented to sharing your data when you signed up, or if you have withdrawn consent, then we will not receive your data. You can check this under ‘Profile’ > ‘Settings’ > ‘Participate in Experiment’ should be switched ‘on’. You can change this at any time.

As often as you want and enjoy! Every time you play you help us to better understand the brain. If you play each game and questionnaire once, this is already great! If you are up for it, you can play all of them more them once and you can try to beat your current high score. The more often you play the games, the more stars you get and the higher you can move up in the ranks – have you reached the ‘Space Lord’ level yet?

Yes! We have tried to choose colours that are dissociable even for people with colourblindness. However, in some games (esp. Space Observers), this may sometimes be more tricky. We have thus developed algorithms that automatically adjust the difficulty of the task, so that everyone can enjoy the games.

Yes, some aliens may be easier to detect than others. This also depends on the phone type and your screen settings, which makes it difficult to have them exactly the same. However, we use an automatic algorithm that adjusts the difficulty of the game, and which controls for differences in the aliens’ colours.

We are really excited about all the positive feedback that we receive from our users, thank you so much! By playing our games and filling out our questionnaires, you already greatly help us and contribute to our research. If you want to help us further, then please feel free to leave a good rating for our app in the App Store. Moreover, we would be most grateful if you could share our app with your friend and family, and on Facebook, Twitter or other social media. Everybody is welcome to contribute to our research and we greatly appreciate your support!

This depends on the game. In some games, this is simply the number of points you have gathered throughout the entire game. In some games, we assess how well you perform and compare it to how others perform. Please note that some of the games include an element of luck (e.g., the gambling in the Scavenger game). It can thus be that you played perfectly well, but because of bad luck you did not win that many points. Don’t give up – just play it again!

In our questionnaires, we ask you about your feelings, behaviours, and worries. Even though these are standardised scales to capture different aspects of mental health and personality, they are not valid as clinical measures. If you think you may struggle with a specific mental health problem, then please speak to a mental health professional or your general practicioner. They can help you and assess whether you suffer from a mental health illness

We will publish our research findings in peer-reviewed academic journals. This means that other scientists will carefully look at our findings and examine them before they get published in academic magazines. This can take up to several years. Once we have our first findings, we will let you know on this website, on Twitter, and on our lab website. If you follow us, you will be the first to know what we have found out!

There are different ways you can get in touch with us:

• If you want to provide anonymous feedback about the app, then you can simply use the ‘Feedback’ button in the ‘Profile’ section. We will receive your feedback, but dont know who sent it, so we cannot respond
• If you want to talk to us directly, then please send us a message either via the contact form below, or via feedback [at] brainexplorer.net. It may take a few days until we will respond.
• If you like the Brain Explorer app, please leave a rating on the Android Play Store or the Apple App Store. We very much appreciate this.