Interface Bridging Mind And Body: The Wiimote

[Guest guest]

Interface Bridging Mind And Body: The Wiimote

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/99512.php

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. "

http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?

articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001728