Outreach posts
Publicly-funded research belongs in the public domain and it is our duty to make our research understandable. Here you will find posts that try to explain our research in a way that is user friendly. Many of the students in the lab will have written these posts and often these students have been directly involved in this research. It is our aim over the next few years to grow this site to provide summaries of all our newly published research. Please add your own comments and get involved with the discussion. And feel free to email us to let us know what you think or would like to see included here.
Observing leads to a different type of learning than acting, being more verbal and strategic
If someone informed you that learning a skill through demonstration was no different from learning by physically performing the skill itself, your first reaction to this news might be suspicion and/or disbelief. However, this piece of information would seem more plausible if you were aware of developments in neurophysiology pertaining to the discovery of “mirror neurons”, first in macaque monkeys then subsequently in the human brain. A multitude of studies have since shown that a circuitry of cortical neurons normally activated during physical movement is also...
It’s not enough just to feel or see what’s correct, you need to 'actively' experience
Have you ever wondered how effective it is to physically guide a person through an action? In sports, the instructor might hold a person's arm to show them how to hit a golf ball or strike a volleyball serve. In rehabilitation, robotic devices are used to guide a person's limb for therapy purposes. What we and others have shown is that this technique is useful when applied, but that it compromises...
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