For some young fair-goers, there was more to this year’s Minnesota State Fair than cheese curds and  deep-fried Twinkies on a stick. For five days during the Fair’s 12-day run, over  200  children and young adults got the chance to participate in a research study conducted by the School of Kinesiology‘s Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory (HSCL) in the U of M Driven to Discover building.

Lab director Prof. Jűrgen Konczak and his graduate students set up a mini-lab in their booth and invited visitors aged 3-18 years to take a test that would help determine how  proprioception, the ability to sense the position of one’s body and limbs, develops in childhood.

“The State Fair is a great venue for data collection and study recruitment,” says I-Ling Yeh, PhD student and graduate assistant in the HSCL. “People came by the Driven to Discover building because they’re interested in what the U is doing, and they found out they could be part of a research study. They liked the idea of contributing to the normative data.”

The test took about five minutes, and participants got their scores and charted results almost immediately. “Siblings were competing to get the best scores,” says I-Ling. “It was fun to see. They thought it was cool to be part of a research project.”

All graduate assistants and visiting scholars currently working in Dr. Konczak’s lab took a turn working during the State Fair, said I-Ling, which was necessary considering the large number of participants they tested in just a few days. “If we didn’t have such a large lab we couldn’t have done it.”

The study results will be used in a forthcoming research article, and study designers hope that the data gathered will lead to information that could be used for future diagnostic purposes.