The purpose of this study is to provide a new perspective for evaluating physicality in learning with a preliminary experimental study based on embodied cognition. While there are studies showing no superiority of physical manipulation over virtual manipulation, there are also studies that seem to advocate adding more physicality in simulations for learning. Thus, this study addressed an alternative explanation for explaining the effects of physicality by focusing more on perceptual experiences and embodiment. The experimental study with 48 graduate students supported pre-existing results, which did not discover any differences between physical and virtual manipulations in learning physics. More importantly, the results of this study showed that the perceptual experience of driving a manual transmission car was critical for comprehending how gears work. This implies that the physicality added to a learning experience should be evaluated in terms of its potential to create embodiment rather than the mode of interaction—physical or virtual.
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