When she’s not busy being the dean of the School of Human Kinetics and Recreation, Dr. Heather Carnahan studies how offshore workers learn to coordinate their movements as they acquire safety and survival skills.

She and her colleagues at the Offshore Safety and Survival Centre (OSSC) research lab will share their findings with scholars from around the world this week at the Canadian Society of Pyschomotor Learning and Sport Psychology (SCAPPS) conference, coming to St. John’s.

“The study of the relationship between cognition and movement is not a new area,” said Dr. Carnahan, who has been working for over a year with the Society to prepare for the conference. “SCAPPS was founded almost 50 years ago by academics to study sport and exercise psychology, motor control, motor learning and motor development.”

Over 225 researchers and graduate students from across Canada and the United States, and from Ireland, Wales, and Germany are expected.

At this year’s annual conference, over 200 oral and poster presentations will be delivered on topics ranging from how coaches shape the quality of athletes' experiences in parasport, to sport experiences of indigenous youth through participation in traditional games, using video simulations and virtual reality to improve skill performance, to the neural processes involved in motor skill performance.

The opening days starts with workshop at the OSSC facility in Foxtrap where Drs. Carnahan, Liz Sanli, Matthew Ray and Desmond Mulligan, and graduate student Stefani Martina will highlight their research.

“The OSSC serves as our living lab for doing applied motor learning research,” explained Dr. Carnahan. “With a 3D motion helicopter cabin simulator and a Helicopter Underwater Egress Training simulator in an environmental theatre, we can study how the realism of a person’s training environment affects their ability to master a skill.”

Four keynote speeches will be delivered by international renowned researchers in the fields of ageing, group dynamics and physical activity, kinesiology and physical activity and mental health.

The SCAPPS conference gets underway Oct. 12 at the Delta Hotel and continues until Oct 14.