Non-Instrumental Movement Inhibition

Non-Instrumental Movement Inhibition (NIMI) is a psychological phenomenon; it is a form of embodied behavior, where the body reveals the thoughts and emotions in a person's mind. During NIMI visual engagement or attention leads subconsciously to lower levels of fidgeting (and other non-instrumental movements). Non-Instrumental movements are bodily actions that are not related to the goal of the current task; these behaviors include fidgeting, scratching, postural micromovements, and certain emotional expressions. NIMI is important for recognizing boredom during human-robot interaction, human-computer interaction, computer-aided learning and automated tutoring systems, market research, and experience design. The original observation that, in a seated audience, interest is associated with diminished fidgeting, and that boredom doubles the amount of human movement, was made by Francis Galton in 1885.

Experiments reflecting the existence of NIMI were suggested by a series of papers on automated tutoring systems by Sidney D’Mello and colleagues. Using the non-visual metronome response task, Paul Seli and collaborators showed that increased episodes of mind wandering increased fidgeting, presumably because attention requires comparative stillness (described as “a secondary task”). Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze and colleagues demonstrated that engagement in games (and human computer interaction) could lead to either increased movement or decreased movement, depending on the motivational nature of movement tasks involved with the accomplishment of the task. Harry Witchel and colleagues named the inhibitory phenomenon as NIMI, and demonstrated that the visual aspect of the human-computer interaction task was the most powerful contributor to the inhibitory effect on movement. They also demonstrated that, during individual human computer interaction in instrumentally identical reading comprehension tasks, interest itself was sufficient to diminish movement. This was reflected in experiments by Patrick Healy and colleagues in a seated audience at a dance performance. While it is known that frustration and restlessness can lead to increased movement during human computer interaction, it remains controversial as to whether NIMI is actually an inhibition of a baseline amount of physiologically required movement.