Proposed fMRI Study: The Role of Self-Generated Object Formation in Novel Object Category Learning

Recent research indicates that the self-produced visual-motor nature of handwriting provides variable visual output that better facilitates symbol understanding (Li & James 2016). In addition, viewing novel objects/hearing novel verbs that were learned through active manipulation resulted in greater motor activation in the brain than learning through passive viewing (James & Swain 2011). The proposed study attempts to investigate the understanding and neural underpinnings of novel objects when learned in a self-production condition similar to handwriting: forming objects with clay. 7-8 year-old participants will learn novel object categories through three conditions: a high active condition in which participants form objects with clay, a low active condition in which participants actively hold/explore pre-made objects, and a passive condition in which participants watch the experimenter hold pre-made objects. Following this training session, an object-sorting task will be used to assess the participants’ knowledge of the object categories. Finally, a fMRI session will attempt to investigate motor and whole-brain activation differences between the two active conditions.