UC Berkeley

Stimulation of the senses plays a fundamental role in regulating arousal to support engagement with the world. Research on neurodiversity reveals a range of sensory regulation needs amongst humans, including need for different intensities of vestibular (balance) sensory stimulation. In parallel, the embodiment turn in the cognitive sciences challenges the separation of bodily experiences from cognition, problematizing the presumed irrelevance of sensory regulatory movements like fidgeting to cognition. In this design-based research dissertation, I explore the integration of embodied cognition and sensory regulation perspectives for understanding movement in learning as it informs inclusive design. I propose and evaluate a design, Balance Board Math (BBM), that explicitly integrates sensory regulatory movement into embodied design to serve conceptual learning, focusing on the bodily sense of balance. BBM is a digital platform for discovery-based math learning that establish the vestibular-stimulating action of bodily rocking as the basis for exploring various mathematical concepts. To serve sensory regulation inclusively, BBM introduces vestibular sensory differentiation, offering learners adaptive vestibular stimulation at their preferred intensity. This dissertation contains four papers. The first describes the BBM design, rationale, and design principles, as well as results from an in-depth semi-structured BBM task-based interview study with 6 school-age children showing that children used their sense of balance to explore and discuss mathematical ideas, and that doing so changed how they oriented to mathematical graphs. The second elaborates on the BBM design with regards to how it transforms mathematical thinking, illustrated with examples from multiple empirical BBM studies. The third paper is a conceptual paper outlining an embodied rethinking of sensory-regulatory stimming as epistemic activity, using the BBM design as an example to discuss implications for pedagogical design. The fourth paper is a hybrid conceptual–empirical paper discussing sensory differentiation, evaluated through a study of how children stimmed within 20 BBM task-based semi-structured interviews. Overall, this dissertation contributes to learning theory by studying sensory regulation as an interactive and epistemic resource, expanding models of embodied cognition.