Let’s do the time warp again – embodied learning of the concept of time in an applied school setting

ABSTRACT

Embodied Cognition approaches suggest that movements influence the understanding of abstract concepts such as time. It follows that moving the arms as watch hands should boost children’s learning to read the clock. In a school setting, we compared three learning conditions: an embodied (movement) condition, an interactive App condition, and a text condition. Age, self-reported enjoyment, and group size were controlled. In a clock-time-test, the embodied condition resulted in better performances than the mean of the other conditions in small, but not in large groups. This innovative, theory-informed approach may advance learning of abstract concepts in children.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – RA 940/15-1. We are thankful to Abdelillha Khattabi, Robert Gundermann, Max Röbel, Sina Reinfeldt, and Lisa Dammeier for their help throughout the experimental process. We also would like to thank our young participants for joining the experiment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [Grant Number RA 940/15-1].

Notes on contributors

Jonna Loeffler

Jonna Löffler

Research profile:

- Temporal and spatial representations from an Embodied Cognition perspective

- The development of abstract concepts across the lifespan

Expertise of methods:

- linear mixed modeling

- multivariate statistics

- ERPs (MMN)

- Bayesian analyses

Teaching profil:

- Social Psychology

- Which psychological mechanisms explain our behavior in social situations (e.g. sport setting, work context)

- Sportpsychology

- Self- and Team-management

- Foundations in Business Psychology

- Theories and mechanisms about human cognition (including action & perception)

Markus Raab

Dr. Markus Raab (1968) is Full Professor and Director of the Department of Performance Psychology, Head of the Institute of Psychology at the German Sport University as well as Research Professor at the London South Bank Uni-versity, UK. He is president of the current Managing Council of FEPSAC and served in other associations such as asp and EFPA. He was awarded by the DOSB, asp, FEPSAC, DGPs, ECSS, Springer Publisher, NCA, NRW state and the University of Heidelberg. He serves (or has served) as an editor (in-chief, associate, section) for ZfS, PSE, IJSEP, SEPP, Frontiers in Psychology, Latin American Journal on Sport and Exercise Psychology. His main areas of interest are exercise psychology, embodied cognition, motor learning and motor control. After predicting 2017 research in sport psychology until 2050 he currently tries to self-fulfil that prediction.

Rouwen Cañal-Bruland

Rouwen Cañal-Bruland

Research Interests:

• Motor learning and motor control

• Implicit and explicit motor learning

• Embodied cognition/ Embodied perception

• Perception and Action

• Expertise

• Cognition and motor performance

• Emotion and motor performance

• Visual perception, attention and anticipation

• Multisensory integration in sport

Short CV:

• since October 2016: Professor for the Psychology of Human Movement and Sport, Institute of Sport Science, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany

• 2008 - 2016: Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Movement Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• December 2007: PhD, University of Münster

Research visits to Liverpool John Moores University (UK), the University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong SAR, China) and the University of Virginia (USA)