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The Nintendo Wii is an immensely popular source of videogame entertainment, but
more recently, it has been adapted for a number of different uses, such as a
tool for physical therapy and as a form of exercise for geriatrics. New research
from the University of Memphis, published this week in the journal PLoS ONE,
has found another use: psychological experimentation. By integrating the
Nintendo Wiimote with a laboratory computer, psychologist Rick Dale and his
student collaborators were able to extract rich information about a person's
reaching movements while they performed a learning task.
The authors were interested in how the dynamic characteristics of arm movement
change as people become better at a task. Data from the Wiimote permitted the
researchers to demonstrate that body movements change systematically along with
change in mental processing (in this case, learning). These results provide new
evidence that cognition and action systems, still thought by many to be
relatively separate subsystems in the human mind, are actually deeply
intertwined.
"The Wiimote is in fact the perfect interface to perform these kinds of
experiments," Dale remarked. "As the game itself is already designed
to absorb a person's body into the videogame experience, we just have to hook
the Wiimote into a lab computer, and we can enjoy the rich streaming data that
videogames typically use, but this time track them in experiments."
Dale and his students continuously tracked the position and acceleration of
participants' choices as they learned to match unfamiliar symbols into pairs. As
people learned, their bodies reflected the confidence of that learning.
Participants moved the Wiimote more quickly, more steadily, and also pressed on
it more firmly as they became familiar with the symbols. While everyone knows
that you get better at moving in tasks that require intricate movement (such as
learning to use chopsticks), these results suggest that your body movements are
related to learning other information as well.
Their results suggest that when the body accompanies more complex learning
experiences in school or at work, it can richly reflect that underlying process
of learning. The authors suggest that this idea may help adaptive computer
interfaces and learning technologies extract information about a user or learner
- by paying close attention to their body dynamics.
The authors note that using the Wiimote now provides psychologists with a very
affordable and immersive environment to study the relations between cognition
and action. Existing technology to track three-dimensional movement typically
costs many thousands of dollars, but the use of the Wiimote may provide an
accessible and enjoyable alternative.
"One reason the Nintendo Wii is so wildly successful is that it integrates
natural bodily movements with the mental processing involved in gaming,"
Dale notes, "our results offer further testament to this. Your body and
your mind are really one system, naturally changing with each other in all our
daily learning and other cognitive experiences."
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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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Citation: Dale R, Roche J, Snyder K, McCall R (2008) Exploring Action Dynamics
as an Index of Paired-Associate Learning. PLoS ONE 3(3): e1728.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001728
Link
to the published article.
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Source: Rebecca Walton
Public Library of
Science