The Ecological Task Dynamics of Learning and Transfer in Coordinated Rhythmic Movement

Research spanning 100 years has revealed that learning a novel perception-action task is remarkably task-specific. With only a few exceptions, transfer is typically very small, even with seemingly small changes to the task. This fact has remained surprising given previous attempts to formalise the notion of what a task is, which have been dominated by common-sense divisions of tasks into parts. This article lays out an ecologically grounded alternative, ecological task dynamics, which provides us with tools to formally define tasks as experience from the first-person perspective of the learner. We explain this approach using data from a learning and transfer experiment using bimanual coordinated rhythmic movement as the task, and acquiring a novel coordination as the goal of learning. 10 participants were extensively trained to perform 60° mean relative phase; this learning transferred to 30° and 90°, against predictions derived from our previous work. We use recent developments in the formal model of the task to guide interpretation of the learning and transfer results.