Computers Change the Way we Learn?

(Ivanhoe Newswire) –When you use a computer regularly, you are constantly mapping the movements of your hand and computer mouse to the cursor on the screen. Now, a new study is showing that all that clicking and pointing changes the way the brain generalizes movements.

"Computers produce this problem that screens are of different sizes and mice have different gains. We want to quickly learn about these so that we do not need to relearn all possible movements once we switch to a new computer. If you have broad generalization, then you need to move the mouse just once, and there you are calibrated,” Konrad Kording of Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, was quoted as saying.

Their findings show that computer use not only changes our lifestyle, but also affects the neural representation of our movements. Researchers say that this new understanding of movement learning might have important real-world implications for people who do physical rehabilitation.

For more information, contact: Mary Beth O'Leary, moleary@cell.com

SOURCE: Current Biology, December 2013