Motor Learning through Cooperative Motor Experience

Humans can acquire an adaptation ability, so called “adaptability” against unfamiliar cooperative tasks through their motor experience with others. It seems that training with a human expert is effective to have such ability compared to training with a novice, however it remains open question. To investigate the effect of the skill level of the partner during training period on the adaptability, we designed a cooperative visuomotor task; an object was connected by a virtual spring with the cursor controlled by the participant. We instructed paired participants (Novice-Novice or Novice-Expert group) to jointly move the object to a specified target under a disturbing virtual force field. As a result, the subjects trained in the Novice-Novice group showed superior performance and adaptability. Variety of experience in the cooperative motor task probably gave rise to high adaptability in the Novice-to-Novice group participants.