This SGER project explores a new area of study in which little is known: how skills learned within virtual environments (VE's) such as Nintendo's Wii are transfered to real-life natural environments. Part of what makes this study high-risk is that there many factors to control for to systematically compare skill transfer from and to virtual and real-life environments. The goal of this exploratory project is to investigate the mechanisms transfer through three mixed-methods experiments involving cooking. In this project new ethnographic methods for encoding what and how skills are acquired in VE's will be developed as appropriate (e.g., through video analysis). The PI is a world leader in "distributed cognition" and is the ideal person to lead this preliminary investigation of skill acquisition across real and virtual environments.
The broader impact of this research is in its potential to uncover new affordances of virtual environments for task acquisition, with implications for VE design. Through validating ethnographic methods for studying virtual to real-world transfer, this project will benefit other researchers. Further, these experiments serve as an important first contribution toward a future body of research that examinines how combining virtual and real-world training/instructions may best optimize human performance.
