Playing Mathematical Instruments: Emerging Perceptuomotor Integration With an Interactive Mathematics Exhibit
- 1 March 2013
- journal article
- Published by National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Journal for Research in Mathematics Education
- Vol. 44 (2), 372-415
- https://doi.org/10.5951/jresematheduc.44.2.0372
Abstract
Research in experimental and developmental psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that tool fluency depends on the merging of perceptual and motor aspects of its use, an achievement we call perceptuomotor integration. We investigate the development of perceptuomotor integration and its role in mathematical thinking and learning. Just as expertise in playing a piano relies on the interanimation of finger movements and perceived sounds, we argue that mathematical expertise involves the systematic interpenetration of perceptual and motor aspects of playing mathematical instruments. Through 2 microethnographic case studies of visitors who engaged with an interactive mathematics exhibit in a science museum, we explore the real-time emergence of perceptuomotor integration and the ways in which it supports mathematical imagination.Keywords
This publication has 65 references indexed in Scilit:
- When the Classroom Floor Becomes the Complex Plane: Addition and Multiplication as Ways of Bodily NavigationJournal of the Learning Sciences, 2012
- Hands on the future: facilitation of cortico‐spinal hand‐representation when reading the future tense of hand‐related action verbsEuropean Journal of Neuroscience, 2010
- Supporting Student Learning: A Comparison of Student Discussion in Museums and ClassroomsVisitor Studies, 2010
- Working with artefacts: gestures, drawings and speech in the construction of the mathematical meaning of the visual pyramidEducational Studies in Mathematics, 2008
- Mathematical imagination and embodied cognitionEducational Studies in Mathematics, 2008
- Involuntary Motor Activity in Pianists Evoked by Music PerceptionJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2001
- Project Math‐Muse: Interactive Mathematics Exhibits for Young ChildrenCurator: The Museum Journal, 1999
- The function of gesture in learning to count: more than keeping trackCognitive Development, 1999
- Metaphors we move byVisual Anthropology, 1996
- Functions, Graphs, and Graphing: Tasks, Learning, and TeachingReview of Educational Research, 1990