It’s not just for thrashing friends in Mario Kart, or jumping around in Mario Galaxy, or for feeling good about yourself on Wii Fit, as a US academic is coming to NUIG to give a lecture on his experiments using the Nintendo Wii to investigate how people think and make decisions.
The lecture is set for the School of Psychology on Wednesday November 12 at 7.30pm in the Siobhan McKenna Theatre in the Arts Millennium Building.
The Nintendo Wii is one of the most popular video game systems of all time bringing gaming to the mainstream with titles like Wii Sports and Wii Fit.
Dr Dale and his team took the Nintendo a step further to begin to explore the relationship between the mind and the body. He said,“The Wiimote is in fact the perfect interface to perform these kinds of experiments.
“As the game itself is already designed to absorb a person’s body into the video game experience, we just have to hook the Wiimote into a lab computer, and we can enjoy the rich streaming data that video games typically use, but this time track them in experiments.”
Until recently the majority of psychologists concluded that thinking and acting were managed by relatively separate subsystems in the human mind. This was reflected in the way that when we make decisions, most of us feel like we think and then act. Dr Dale’s research shows the systems that control thinking and those that control action are actually deeply intertwined. He adds, “We often begin to act before we think, even when making relatively simple decisions. Some might say that we even think through our actions.”
One of the experiments at the University of Memphis showed that people have a ‘bias toward truth’ in that there is a natural tendency to believe things are true.
Dr Dale’s visit to Ireland is hosted by NUI Galway and supported by the Irish Research Council on the Humanities and the Social Sciences. For further information on the public lecture contact Denis O'Hora at the NUI Galway School of Psychology on 091-495126.
