The Wiimote as an interface bridging mind and body

[Celebration]

http://www.physorg.com/news123927674.html

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.

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“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.”