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The computer mouse changes the way we see the world around us

29.12.2013

Even a slight experience of using a computer mouse completely changes a person's perception of their movements. Thanks to working with a computer mouse, a person begins to “generalize” his actions much better and navigate in space. This conclusion was reached by neurophysiologists who published an article in the journal Current Biology.

In an unusual experiment, which was conducted by Kording and his colleagues, 18 volunteers from China participated. Half of these people have never had experience with a computer mouse. The researchers asked their subjects to pass a light test - to touch one of the eight points on the LCD screen, located on the surface of the table, moving their hand under it.

"Working on a computer can have two problems: display sizes can be different, and existing mouse models move the cursor on the screen at different speeds. When we start working on a new computer, we want to get used to it and not learn all the movements again. If a person knows how " generalize" his actions, he only needs to make one movement for "self-calibration," says Konrad Kording of Northwestern University in Chicago.

Both groups of volunteers coped with the task equally well, however, the subjects who had previous experience with a computer mouse quickly adapted to situations in which they had to move their hand to an unusual point. It can be concluded that their brains were better able to "generalize" the techniques and information that they received in the course of training.

Having discovered this phenomenon, the researchers decided to find out what would happen if the "illiterate" Chinese learned to use a mouse even before the start of the experiment. To do this, they recruited another group of volunteers and taught their wards "literacy" with the help of computer games for two weeks.

After two weeks of training, the volunteers began to “generalize” their movements just as well as the “literate” subjects. Since in developed countries almost all people know how to work with a computer, the authors of the article proposed to take this into account in the course of research on the areas of the human brain responsible for coordination and movement.

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