Exploring movement as thought in conversation with Craig Chapman
8 January 2026
Craig Chapman
Understanding movement as a window into human thought is at the centre of associate professor Craig Chapman’s research program. As a scholar working across psychology, neuroscience and kinesiology, Chapman continues to push the boundaries of how we understand the relationship between the body and the mind. His recent success with grants from SSHRC (SSHRC IDG), CFI and NSERC* reflects a research program that crosses disciplinary borders and builds new bridges between natural sciences, social sciences and the performing arts.
In this conversation, professor Pirkko Markula-Denison, associate dean of research, speaks with Chapman about his academic journey, new projects and the exciting future of movement research at KSR.
Craig, can you tell me a little bit about yourself as a researcher? What is your research area?
My training background is in psychology. If I had to pick a specific area, I would probably say cognitive psychology, which is what my master’s and PhD reflect. But I did all of my graduate work in a neuroscience lab, focusing on the neuroscience of movement and how the brain controls the body.
So, when I was looking for faculty positions, kinesiology was a natural fit because of its focus on the neural control of movement. I see myself living somewhere between psychology, neuroscience and kinesiology.
You recently received a SSHRC IDG grant. What inspired you to pursue a social science direction?
This is really a mentorship success story. My postdoc, Brea Chouinard, helped open my eyes to how my work could meaningfully operate in a social science context. Her research focuses on stigma in neurodivergent populations, and she showed me how the science of movement and nonverbal communication connects directly to those issues.
Working with her, and also my involvement in the large CFI project in Drama (see below), made it clear that thinking of social sciences and natural sciences as separate silos is not useful. Performing arts involve moving bodies expressing thoughts and feelings, which relates directly to what I study. Those collaborations showed me how my work interacts with the social sciences.
Can you tell us more about your SSHRC project? What is your main question?
For most of my career, I’ve been exploring the idea that when you carefully observe movement, you are observing a key component of thinking. The moving body is a thinking body.
Brea, as a speech-language pathologist, works with people who rely heavily on nonverbal communication. One of her interests is autistic individuals, who are often stigmatized as poor communicators. We had already shown in earlier work that autistic and non-autistic people can interpret nonverbal movement cues similarly.
So the big question became: How does stigma shape nonverbal communication? If you watch someone move, your interpretation may shift if you think the person is autistic or not. Likewise, people may change how they move if they know who is watching them. We want to study how systemic bias interacts with nonverbal communication.
We are creating a diverse set of videos of people performing simple movements. By manipulating what participants know about the performer, we can examine how stigma influences both the sending and receiving of nonverbal cues.
How far along is the project?
We are right at the edge of the available methods. I’m working on a markerless motion capture system that lets us capture body dynamics without any wearable markers. The cameras are set up and running. Our hope is to pilot test before the end of the fall term. In early 2026, working with undergraduate students and my collaborator, associate professor Dana Hayward in Psychology, we plan to collect data from autistic and non-autistic participants under different stigma conditions.
You also mentioned the large CFI grant. What is that project about and what is your involvement?
This project began in a very serendipitous way. I discovered that another parent at the playground, Xiaoting Li, is a professor at the U of A. She and the head of Drama, April Viczko, were leading a major CFI initiative to reimagine the Blevis Laboratory Theatre as a cutting-edge performance and performance-capture studio.
It is an incredible forty-foot cubic space, perfect for capturing movement. They invited me in for my expertise in movement capture and data collection. I contributed to the technical side: motion tracking, computing requirements and methodological design.
The project is titled “Creating Diverse Realities” and reflects the idea that performance, movement and interaction all involve constructing and sharing realities. I think this will become a landmark facility on campus. I have never seen anything like it in Canada.
Can you tell us about your new NSERC project?
This is the first time in my career where I feel I am intentionally building on a strong foundation of previous work. The theoretical base is the idea of moving as thinking. Methodologically, I have developed the tools and experiments to support this idea.
My NSERC proposal expands this work in two streams.
Self-movement awareness: Can you observe your own body and learn something about your own thinking? How aware are you of your own movements? Surprisingly, people have very little awareness of the fine details of how they move. Someone watching you might know more about certain aspects of your thinking than you do.
Nonverbal communication between people: How do two people use movement and gaze to communicate or conceal intentions? We ran a study where two people played a card game either cooperatively or competitively, while we tracked their movements and eye gaze. People moved differently depending on whether they were cooperating or competing.
This opens up many possibilities for understanding how people share information through movement in real social interactions.
What methods do you use for studying awareness of your own movements?
We usually rely on subjective reports. A participant makes a simple pointing movement, then we show them two versions of that movement. One is real, one is altered. We ask: Which one is yours?
People are not very good at this, even though millimetre-level movement details reliably reflect aspects of thought. It becomes even harder when movements happen on a screen, which is interesting because so much of our world is digitally mediated now.
How important is proprioception for this kind of awareness?
This is exactly what my student Jess brings to the lab from her background in proprioception research. Her hypothesis is that proprioceptive cues drive movement awareness, so if we increase those cues, awareness should increase.
That means involving more joints and more dynamic, complex movements, similar to dance. It is harder to capture and analyze, but it is a direction we want to pursue. There may be meaningful differences between experts, such as dancers, and non-experts in how well they can recreate or recognize their own movements.
Thinking in motion
Many of the questions Chapman explores here build on ideas previously examined in his Folio feature Smartphone swipes reveal clues to how we make decisions. Across projects and platforms, the throughline remains the same: movement is not simply an output of thought, but an essential part of how thinking happens.
*Research Funding
This research is supported by: