As you swipe on your smartphone throughout the day, checking your email or buying something online, you're leaving behind clues about how your brain makes decisions — and new research out of the University of Alberta shows that these movements could be valuable for studying human behaviour.
The phrase "moving is thinking" has been the driving force behind Craig Chapman's research in the Actions in Complex Environments Laboratory (ACELab) for a decade. "We can actually understand a lot of what's going on inside someone's head by carefully measuring what's going on outside their head," explains Chapman, an associate professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation.
In a recent study, Chapman and his collaborators in the Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute proved that everyday devices like smartphones and tablets could collect the same kind of movement information as specialized lab equipment and mouse-tracking tests. It's a finding that could revolutionize research in this field — instead of bringing dozens of study participants into a lab, researchers could gather tens of thousands of insights virtually.
"We went out into the wild and grabbed the data from people on their own devices in their own homes," says Chapman.
Traditionally, decision research focuses on button clicks, without tracking anything to do with the movement involved in those decisions. If any tracking is done, it's typically mouse-tracking. However, Chapman's approach makes movement a key part of the equation.
"Most other research has just focused on the what: What did you choose? What was the end result? But my lab really likes to focus on the how: How did you choose? How did your body physically move to enact that decision for you?"
As Chapman explains, our decisions typically involve physical movements. You have to reach for an item you want or walk across the room to open a door. The "how" — the speed of your movements or the path you take — offers insight into the decision-making process.
Devices like smartphones and tablets are ideal for this research, because the way we move our finger on a touch screen is a bit more true to life than the way we move a computer mouse, although Chapman adds that any type of tracking offers beneficial insights on the decision making process.
For the study, Chapman gave participants three tasks to test different types of decisions — comparing numbers, verifying the accuracy of a sentence, or selecting a preferred photo from a set.
"We wanted to choose a range of tasks that varied in as many different dimensions as we could," says Chapman. The researchers measured reaction time, movement time, and how direct or curved the movement path was on the screen. They found that the touch devices accurately mirrored real-world reaching behaviours.
"We think touch devices are perhaps even better for revealing movement signatures of decision-making because you have to move and interact in a more realistic way," says Chapman. "We believe the brain is having to control the swiping movements as though they are real reaching movements. They have to cover more time and space and, as a result, are more susceptible to the factors that influence real reaching."
Chapman says the ability to gather this type of behavioural data through accessible, everyday devices could be transformative for a wide range of industries. For example, tracking movement signatures could enrich standard questionnaires in corporate hiring and other assessments.
"Now they can give you a questionnaire on a tablet or smartphone and get movement signatures of decision-making that are way more sensitive, which means the process is more powerful and more efficient."
There are also potential applications in health care. Providers could track movement signatures to assess physical rehabilitation progress remotely. Sports teams and athletes could also tap into insights to optimize their performance and do return-to-play assessments.
"There's this wealth of data that people aren't grabbing," says Chapman. "I want other academics to look at this and say, now I can go get thousands of people to participate in my experiments in a day. The scalability of research implied by this work is massive."
The study was supported by funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and by an Accelerate International Internship award from MITACS.
