Guidance methods for bimanual timing tasks

Observational learning is a learning technique for motor skills that makes use of demonstration. The demonstration can be abstracted into a set of stimuli of any sensory modality, which can lead to computer-aided learning. We aim to find effective and automated methods for observational learning of the repetitive skills that require coordination of the body extremities such as walking, swimming, and rowing. In this paper, as an initial study, four basic information presentation methods (visual flow, visual flash, audio beep, and tactile vibration) are experimentally compared for education of the temporal aspect of motor skills. The task was to drum a eight-beat rhythm repeatedly in accordance to the guidance information to learn three performance speeds (45, 115, and 200 BPM). All learning methods showed similar performance in terms of temporal accuracy, but the gains were retained longer for the methods that provided guidance only for the current sub-task without contextual information.