Children dancing with the MIROR-Impro: Does the reflexive interaction enhance movement creativity?

We introduce an experimental study carried out with children, dealing with embodied cognition, musical creativity and reflexive technology. The reflexive interaction paradigm refers to a particular kind of human-machine interaction based on the mechanism of repetition and variation. We used a reflexive system implemented in the European project MIROR, the MIROR-Impro, ables to imitate the styles of the user which is playing an instrument. Our aim was to investigate whether and how the reflexive interaction with the MIROR-Impro can enhance creative processes and the children abilities to improvise in dance education. The study was conducted in two classes of a primary public school, with 47 children aged 7 to 8. We adopted an experimental design involving two groups, experimental (23 children) and control (24 children). Both groups took part in several musical and dancing activities in the classroom with a keyboard (control group) or with the keyboard and MIRORImpro (experimental group). Before and after the activities, we measured the children motor creativity by using the Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement (TCAM) test, developed by Torrance (1981). Results revealed no significant differences between the results obtained in the TCAM test by the control and the experimental group in the pre-test. Relevantly, in the post-test there was a significant difference between the two groups. In particular, and in line with our hypothesis, there was an increase in the creativity scores of the experimental group with respect to the control group.