Visual dynamics cues in learning complex physical interactions

This study investigated the role of visual dynamics cues (VDCs) in learning to interact with a complex physical system. Manual gait training was used as an exemplary case, as it requires therapists to control the non-trivial locomotor dynamics of patients. A virtual analog was developed that allowed naïve subjects to manipulate the leg of a virtual stroke survivor (a virtual patient; VP) walking on a treadmill using a small robotic manipulandum. The task was to make the VP’s leg pass through early, mid, and late swing gait targets. One group of subjects (n = 17) started practice seeing the VP’s affected thigh and shank (i.e., VDCs); a second control group (n = 16) only saw the point-of-contact (VP ankle). It was hypothesized that, if seeing the VP’s leg provides beneficial dynamics information, the VDC group would have better task performance and generalization than controls. Results were not supportive. Both groups had similar task performance, and for the late swing gait target, a decrement in manipulative accuracy was observed when VDCs were removed in a generalization task. This suggests that when learning to manipulate complex dynamics, VDCs can create a dependency that negatively affects generalization if the visual context is changed.