Transfer of Learning a Novel Coordinated Rhythmic Movement

My PhD student Daniel Leach has just had his first paper accepted (preregistration, preprint, data & analysis files available here on the OSF) so it's way past time when I should blog this cool work. Danny and I have been developing methods, analyses and a theoretical framework to study learning and transfer of learning, and we have some interesting results (plus MANY more questions :) This post is about the first experiment just published; there's more to come!

We use coordinated rhythmic movement as our task; I've blogged this task in many posts and used this research programme as an example of theoretically driven, mechanistic modelling science. The basic form of the task is described here, the basic pattern of behavioural data is described here, and the model that implements our perception-action approach is described here. The main thing to know is that there are only a couple of rhythmic coordinations that are easy without training (0° and 180°), but other coordinations can be learned with feedback driven training. This gives us a simple model task that can serve as a window on perception-action mechanisms of skilled action and learning.