Study: Wiimote Good for Measuring Cognition

The Wii, with its connection from real life physical actions to virtual world videogame actions, continues to fascinate, and has opened up a slew of research possibilities. This week saw another intriguing research study using the Wii, more specifically the Wiimote, from Dr. Rick Dale at U. Memphis along with Jennifer Roche, Kristy Snyder, and Ryan McCall.

Dale and colleagues hooked up a Wiimote to a computer, and used it to measure physical motions taking place during learning tasks. The study showed that as subjects grew more proficient in their learning tasks, their body movements change, becoming more confident and pronounced.

It makes sense that body movement gets better with learning tasks that require fine motor control: a golf swing, for instance. However, this research opens up the possibilities in measuring body movement for other cognitive tasks. It may point to the day when a computer program can measure feedback from its users to gauge how well objectives are being learned.

The Wiimote is a cheap alternative to more expensive three dimensional input devices. Most famously, Johnny Chung Lee showed us how to create a cheap interactive whiteboard using the Wiimote. With this new study, Dale and colleagues have shown how the Wiimote might be used to inexpensively measure body motions. Below is the abstract for their paper.

Much evidence exists supporting a richer interaction between cognition and action than commonly assumed. Such findings demonstrate that short-timescale processes, such as motor execution, may relate in systematic ways to longer-timescale cognitive processes, such as learning. We further substantiate one direction of this interaction: the flow of cognition into action systems. Two experiments explored match-to-sample paired-associate learning, in which participants learned randomized pairs of unfamiliar symbols. During the experiments, their hand movements were continuously tracked using the Nintendo Wiimote. Across learning, participant arm movements are initiated and completed more quickly, exhibit lower fluctuation, and exert more perturbation on the Wiimote during the button press. A second experiment demonstrated that action dynamics index novel learning scenarios, and not simply acclimatization to the Wiimote interface. Results support a graded and systematic covariation between cognition and action, and recommend ways in which this theoretical perspective may contribute to applied learning contexts.

References:
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. [Online.] Available: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%
2Fjournal.pone.0001728