From psychomotor to 'motorpsycho': learning through gestures with body sensory technologies

As information and communication technology continues to evolve, body sensory technologies, like the Microsoft Kinect, provide learning designers new approaches to facilitating learning in an innovative way. With the advent of body sensory technology like the Kinect, it is important to use motor activities for learning in good and effective ways. In this article, we aim to examine both empirical illustrations and theoretical underpinnings for the gesture-based or motor-based learning enabled by the body sensory technology. We review and distill salient concepts and ideas from the existing theoretical and empirical literature related to body-movement-and gesture-based learning, and propose a motorpsycho learning approach. In our discussion, the word/affix motor is synonym to gestures and body movements, and psycho is synonym to cognitive activities. We explore the important role that motors play in psychological activities, especially in cognitive learning. We argue that motors can facilitate psychological activities in learning by enhancing information processing, encoding, representing, and communicating. We also call for more empirical studies on technology-enhanced and gesture-based learning to design, practice, and examine the motorpsycho learning approach.