Embodied cognition posits that physical interactions with the environment play a crucial role in learning, including complex, abstract concepts in STEM disciplines. This is relevant for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) learners who often utilize sign language, which is a naturally embodied, visuospatial mode of communication. My dissertation…

The key research objective is to explore the key functions of virtual reality technology used by educators to improve motor and imagery training in athletes. The sample was 160 students from Shandong Sport University. The main tools used by the scholars were the Athlete Introductory Movement Screen (AIMS) and The Sport Imagery Ability…

Embodied cognition theories view sensorimotor activity as fundamental to learning, knowing, and reasoning. To investigate the role of physical movement in conceptual learning, we developed and explored an Embodied Learning Interactive Chemistry environment (ELI-Chem). The ELI-Chem learning environment includes a computer simulation, a device for…

Achieving an in-depth understanding of unfamiliar science concepts has been found to be difficult when learners can not index science language to relevant sensorimotor experiences. Ongoing research in embodied cognition highlights the importance of relevant sensorimotor experiences in understanding and learning new information. Aiming to foster…

Examining age differences in motor learning using real-world tasks is often problematic due to task novelty and biomechanical confounds. Here, we investigated how children and adults acquire a novel motor skill in a virtual environment. Participants of three different age groups (9-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults) learned to use their upper…

To harness the complexity of their high-dimensional bodies during sensorimotor development, infants are guided by patterns of freezing and freeing of degrees of freedom. For instance, when learning to reach, infants free the degrees of freedom in their arm proximodistally, that is, from joints that are closer to the body to those that are more…

In this study, to learn the routine of Tantui, a branch of martial arts was taken as an object of research. Fitts' stages of motor learning and augmented reality (AR) were applied to a 3D mobile-assisted learning system for martial arts, which was characterized by free viewing angles. With the new system, learners could rotate the viewing angle of…

This investigation examined short-term changes in child and adult cyclists' gap decisions and movement timing in response to general and specific road-crossing experiences. Children (10- and 12-year-olds) and adults rode a bicycle through a virtual environment with 12 intersections. Participants faced continuous cross traffic and waited for gaps…

Consideration of a possible use of virtual reality technologies in school contexts requires gathering together the suggestions of many scientific domains aimed at "understanding" the features of these same tools that let them offer valid support to the teaching-learning processes in educational settings. Specifically, the present study is aimed at…

The inability to navigate independently and interact with the wider world is one of the most significant handicaps that can be caused by blindness, second only to the inability to communicate through reading and writing. Many difficulties are encountered when visually impaired people (VIP) need to visit new and unknown places. Current speech or…

Four experiments investigated the conditions contributing to sensorimotor alignment effects (i.e., the advantage for spatial judgments from imagined perspectives aligned with the body). Through virtual reality technology, participants learned object locations around a room (learning room) and made spatial judgments from imagined perspectives…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 12th International Conference on Mobile Learning 2016, which was organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society, in Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, April 9-11, 2016. The Mobile Learning 2016 Conference seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of…

Autonomously developing organisms face several challenges when learning reaching movements. First, motor control is learned unsupervised or self-supervised. Second, knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies is acquired in contexts in which action consequences unfold in time. Third, motor redundancies must be resolved. To solve all 3 of these…

This paper describes a neural model of speech acquisition and production that accounts for a wide range of acoustic, kinematic, and neuroimaging data concerning the control of speech movements. The model is a neural network whose components correspond to regions of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum, including premotor, motor, auditory, and…

The mechanisms of perceptual learning are analyzed theoretically, probed in an orientation-discrimination experiment involving a novel nonstationary context manipulation, and instantiated in a detailed computational model. Two hypotheses are examined: modification of early cortical representations versus task-specific selective reweighting.…