Enactive dialogues: Young children’s social communication in digital mirroring

Informal learning environments, such as science museums, increasingly incorporate interactive digital experiences that engage users through whole-body movement and gesture. In these spaces, children can play and explore together, engage through a broad sensorimotor palette, and acquire novel experiences.

The development of multisensory technologies has also contributed to a renewed interest in the role of the body in children’s thinking and what is becoming to be known as the field of embodied learning.

In this seminar, Minna will present findings from an empirical study with young children interacting in a tailor-designed digital mirroring whole body interaction environment, Digital Others. Taking a multimodal and microinteractional analytical approach to video data, the findings illustrate forms of children’s social communication from an enactive cognition perspective: attentiveness towards one another, joint actions and shared affect, and collaborative development of narratives and play motifs.

This event will be particularly useful for researchers and students interested in the field of embodied learning.

Related links

• UCL Knowledge Lab
• Department of Culture, Communication and Media

Image

Hisu Lee via Unsplash.