Mohit – AR

Knowledge is inextricably linked and immersed in the activity and situation in which it is acquired. Meaningful learning can be achieved by grounding it in the social and physical environment within which it will be used.  The enabling parameters of an immersive AR environment have not been studied from a neurological perspective.  I think learning environments based on AR simulations should try to incorporate two key components  to achieve authentic situatedness thereby increasing far transfer. They are embodiment and embedded  cognition.  AR based learning environments are uniquely suited to creating activities which leverage the local geographic and cultural context. AR based activities must be designed keeping the students as the affective agents in a particular situation. The learning activity must involve the usage of agents’ bodies (sensorimotor, musculoskeletal, etc.) in authentic context. Such a design helps in creating and authentic experience that is likely to be encountered in real world. Mere abstractions in classroom setting do not encourage a holistic real life experience.  There is a finite limit to attention and working memory in the brain. Traditional instructional materials, to avoid cognitive overload, strip scenarios of their richness and detail, thereby creating unauthentic representations. This lower fidelity results in unauthentic scenarios that do not reflect real world encounters for students.  However, in real life situations, to compensate for the limitations of attention and working memory, individuals offload certain cognitive tasks on to the environment.  While designing AR activities, it is particularly important to keep this offloading principle in mind, so that the activities and scenarios can be structured in a way that encourages effective offloading strategies while retaining the most essential cognitive processes.