Designing environments to make it easier to act and infer what to do

How do people design physical spaces to support the achievement of specific goals? In this study, we ask participants to design virtual kitchen environments inspired by the popular video game, "Overcooked." These are 2D gridworld environments where players usually must move and manipulate several objects to prepare each dish (e.g., combine onions and lettuce to make an onion salad). Participants will be asked to design these environments so that a player navigating this environment can efficiently make one of two possible dishes. In this study, some participants will be prompted to design kitchens for cooks who know which dish they are supposed to make (base condition), while other participants will have to infer which dish to make (communicative condition).