Scientists use Wiimote to study link between movement and learning

News regarding the use of the Nintendo Wii to facilitate healing is quite common these days. Scientists from the University of Memphis, however, have found another use for the motion-sensing game machine: psychological experimentation involving the link between the mind and the body. More psychobabble ensues in the full article, located right after the jump.

While it’s fairly common knowledge that the Wii serves a purpose in physical therapy and surgeon training, psychologist Rick Dale and his student collaborators at the University of Memphis are using the motion-sensing console for another purpose. Specifically, they are studying how people’s arm movement’s change as they become better at a task.

Dale and co. hooked up a Nintendo Wii to a lab computer and asked participants to match unfamiliar symbols into pairs while the scientists tracked the position and acceleration of the participants’ choices. The researchers discovered that the participants tended to move the Wiimote more quickly and more steadily, while also pressing more firmly on the buttons.

The implication of Dale’s research is that the human body tends to reflect what a person has learned by adapting its movement to what has been learned. In fact, Dale’s study may help learning technology and computer interfaces extract information about a person by simply paying attention to that person’s movement.

Dale himself noted the usefulness and accessibility of the Nintendo Wii in psychological experimentation:

The Wiimote is in fact the perfect interface to perform these kinds of experiments. As the game itself is already designed to absorb a personÂ’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.

One reason the Nintendo Wii is so wildly successful is that it integrates natural bodily movements with the mental processing involved in gaming. 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.

Perhaps the body can really achieve what the mind can conceive.