Thursday 13 October 2011

Learning a coordinated rhythmic movement with task appropriate coordination feedback

The aim of this study is to develop and test a method of providing augmented feedback that could drive learning but not alter the informational content of the task. Ten participants split into two groups of five (one group received feedback and one group didn’t) took part in two assessment sessions and five training sessions. In the training sessions, they performed ten 20-s trials with a target mean relative phase of 90°, for a total of 50 trials. Feedback was provided to the feedback group by changing the colour of the person-controlled dot from white to green when the participant was moving at 90°, ± an error bandwidth. The error bandwidth faded; in the first session, it was set to 40° and was decreased in each session to 30°, 20°, 15°and 10° to drive learning.


A repeated measures ANOVA was carried out on the proportion time on task data (tolerance = 20°) with Session (2levels: Baseline, Post-training) and Phase (3 levels: 0°, 90°and 180°) as within subject factors and Group (2 levels: Feedback, No Feedback) as a between-subject variable. The group who received coordination feedback significantly improved their ability to maintain a 90° coordination. The No Feedback group showed no improvement at any mean relative phase.


This method demonstrated that it is effective at allowing people to acquire a novel coordination, and it does not change the overall perception action task dynamic. This method therefore will be useful in further studies examining the role of perceptual information or in studies that focus on the learning process.

1 comment:

  1. This is good - well done! It's direct and to the point, which is great. In general, for your write up, I would suggest not reporting the ANOVA in that kind of detail; you can summarise ("An ANOVA confirmed that only the experimental group improved their movement stability, and only at 90°") and if people want the details they can go to that paper (that's what a citation is for). But otherwise, this is great.

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