Category: Methods

Mind, body and Wiimote

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchI’m not usually the one blogging on video games; this tends to be Daniel’s department. After all, he’s got three boys at home, and I live with two horse-obsessed women, so it’s a bit out of my habitual orbit. I get more interaction with tractors than video game consoles. But Daniel tossed this reference my direction, and I decided to write on it for a number of reasons (thanks to Daniel).

According to a recent post on Psyorg.com, ‘The Wiimote as an interface bridging mind and body,’ a research team led by Rick Dale at the University of Memphis has been using the Wiimote from Nintendo to study how people reach as they learn new tasks. As the Psyorg story discusses, the Memphis team taught people a symbol matching task and used the Wiimote to judge the quality of their movements when doing the task.

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.

Continue reading “Mind, body and Wiimote”

Real life methods conference

Jovan at Culture Matters (and, not coincidentally, with me at Macquarie’s anthro department) pointed out to me a conference in Manchester. Titled, Vital Signs: Researching Real Life, the conference is an interdisciplinary meeting to think about how to do research on the kinds of complex tangles that we seem to gravitate towards at Neuroanthropology. The meeting will 9-11 September 2008 at Manchester University. The website describes how:

We are using the concept of ‘real lives’ in an open way to stimulate debate about how research methodologies and methods in the social sciences and beyond can rise to the challenge of producing knowledge and understandings that are ‘vital’ and that resonate with complex and multi-dimensional lived realities.

The call for abstracts is online and outlines the following areas for discussion:

  • Methods for researching nature, culture, the material and the social
  • Researching visual, auditory, tactile and other sensory realms
  • Bridging different disciplines in understanding real life; for example, combining ‘social science’, ‘science’, ‘art’, ‘literature’, ‘history’ and ‘journalism’
  • Mixing methods in real life research. Eg How do we, how can we, combine ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ approaches? Can we transcend that divide?
  • Accessing, measuring, and representing real life. What counts as ‘evidence’?
  • Authenticity, rigour and rhetoric in real life research
  • Researching intersubjectivity, memory, emotions, and humour
  • Communicating and disseminating real life research (in a vital way?)
  • Challenges in analysing real life data
  • Real life research in policy and politics
  • Participatory real life research
  • Real life research ethics and moralities
  • What is real life? Theorising real life

Keynote speakers are Les Back, Tim Ingold and Carolyn Steedman (more info on them here).

Overall, might be worth an inquiry if you’re going to be anyway near Manchester in September.