Touchscreens are becoming increasingly widespread in educational games, enhancing the quality of learner experience. Traditional metrics are often used to evaluate various input modalities, including hand and stylus. However, there exists a gap in understanding the cognitive impacts of these modalities during educational gameplay, which can be addressed through brain signal analysis to gain deeper insights into the underlying cognitive function and necessary brain resources for each condition. This facilitates a more precise comparison between conditions. In this study, we compared the brain signal and user experience of using hands and stylus on touchscreens while playing an educational game by analyzing hemodynamic response and self-reported measures. Participants engaged in a Unity-based educational quiz game using both hand and stylus on a touchscreen in a counterbalanced within-subject design. Oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin data were collected using fNIRS, alongside quiz performance scores and standardized and customized user experience questionnaire ratings. Our findings show almost the same performance level with both input modalities, however, the hand requires less oxygen flow which suggests a lower cognitive effort than using a stylus while playing the educational game. Although the result shows that the stylus condition required more neural involvement than the hand condition, there is no significant difference between the use of both input modalities. However, there is a statistically significant difference in self-reported measures that support the findings mentioned above, favoring the hand that enhances understanding of modality effects in interactive educational environments.

翻译：触摸屏在教育游戏中日益普及，提升了学习者的体验质量。传统指标常被用于评估包括手指和触控笔在内的多种输入方式，然而在理解教育游戏过程中这些交互方式对认知的影响方面仍存在空白。通过脑信号分析可以弥补这一不足，从而更深入地理解各条件下潜在的认知功能及所需脑资源，这有助于实现更精确的条件间比较。本研究通过分析血流动力学响应与自我报告指标，比较了在触摸屏上使用手指和触控笔玩教育游戏时的脑信号与用户体验。参与者采用平衡被试内设计，在基于Unity开发的教育问答游戏中分别使用手指和触控笔在触摸屏上进行操作。研究使用fNIRS采集氧合血红蛋白与脱氧血红蛋白数据，同时记录测试成绩以及标准化与定制化的用户体验问卷评分。研究结果显示两种输入方式的表现水平几乎相同，但使用手指时需要更少的氧流量，这表明在教育游戏过程中手指比触控笔所需的认知努力更低。尽管结果表明触控笔条件比手指条件需要更多的神经参与，但两种输入方式的使用并未呈现显著差异。然而，自我报告指标存在统计学显著差异，该结果支持上述发现，表明手指更受青睐，这增强了对交互式教育环境中输入方式影响的理解。