Perceptual information supports transfer of learning in coordinated rhythmic movement

In this paper, we trained people to produce 90° mean relative phase using task-appropriate feedback and investigated whether and how that learning transfers to other coordinations. Past work has failed to find transfer of learning to other relative phases, only to symmetry partners (identical coordinations with reversed lead–lag relationships) and to other effector combinations. However, that research has all trained people using transformed visual feedback (visual metronomes, Lissajous feedback) which removes the relative motion information typically used to produce various coordinations (relative direction, relative position; Wilson and Bingham, in Percept Psychophys 70(3):465–476, 2008). Coordination feedback (Wilson et al., in J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 36(6):1508, 2010) preserves that information and we have recently shown that relative position supports transfer of learning between unimanual and bimanual performance of 90° (Snapp-Childs et al., in Exp Brain Res 233(7), 2225–2238, 2015). Here, we ask whether that information can support the production of other relative phases. We found large, asymmetric transfer of learning bimanual 90° to bimanual 60° and 120°, supported by perceptual learning of relative position information at 90°. For learning to transfer, the two tasks must overlap in some critical way; this is additional evidence that this overlap must be informational. We discuss the results in the context of an ecological, task dynamical approach to understanding the nature of perception–action tasks.