The Nintendo Wii console doesn’t just offer a new form of entertainment. Doctors and geriatricians have already found interesting uses for improving the health of their patients. And now a team of psychologists from the University of Memphis has just used it for the first time to study the minds of its users.
Analyzing the use of the Wiimote remote, psychologist Rick Dale and his team have shown that an individual’s body movements reflect the changes that occur in his brain during the learning process. Or in other words, that the body and the mind are closely connected.
According to Dale, as a subject learns a new task, his body reflects the increase in confidence: he moves faster, at a constant pace and presses buttons more firmly. “One of the reasons the Nintendo Wii is so successful is that it integrates natural body movements with the mental processes involved in the game,” explains Dale. Therefore, he says, the Wiimote remote control provides psychologists with an immersive and very affordable tool to study the close relationship between action and thought. In fact, in the latest issue of the journal PLoS ONE, the researcher proposes that this knowledge be applied to computers to “extract information about users from body dynamics”, thus increasing interactivity.
