Abstract
In most human movement tasks, the same goal can be achieved by a diversity of coordination patterns. For instance, when learning to juggle, individuals adopt their own unique coordination patterns in the early stages of acquiring the fundamental skills of juggling. These individual differences in the learning paths lead to differences in adaptability to new constraints. However, the reason for these differences in adaptability is still unknown. To address this problem, we quantified these differences in terms of attractor stability of the coordination patterns of expert jugglers using Recurrence Quantification Analysis. Furthermore, we quantified the attractor stability of intermediate jugglers and examined adaptability in a sensorimotor synchronization task. We found differences in attractor stability among coordination patterns of expert jugglers, as well as a difference in attractor stability between intrinsic coordination patterns of intermediate jugglers. Whereas, almost no significant direct correlation between attractor stability and adaptability of intermediate jugglers was found, suggesting a difference in both attractor stability and adaptability between intrinsic coordination patterns such that the difference in attractor stability might affect adaptability to new constraints. We submit that the learning path selected by each learner in the early stages of learning plays an important role in the subsequent development of expertise.
Highlights
In most human movement tasks, the same goal can be achieved by a diversity of coordination patterns
We examined the stability of attractors for various coordination patterns that can appear in juggling tasks and the influence of those differences in attractor stability on the adaptability to new constraints
Based on an examination of coordination patterns produced by expert and intermediate jugglers, there was a difference in attractor stability between the discrete and rhythmic coordination patterns, in that the rhythmic coordination pattern had higher determinism of attractor trajectory and strength of attraction than the discrete coordination pattern
Summary
In most human movement tasks, the same goal can be achieved by a diversity of coordination patterns. In our previous study[11], a longitudinal study of the learning process associated with the fundamental skills of juggling showed that the coordination patterns acquired by learners were divided into multiple attractors with a stable temporal structure. The study findings suggested that in a visuomotor reaching task, participants who learned by performing discrete reaching movements in a previous process showed a nearly complete transition to performing rhythmic reaching movement without hardly any transfer in the opposite direction. Such asymmetry of adaptation appeared in our previous study on three-ball juggling, a multi-degree-of-freedom movement task[17]. It is widely known that stable performance can be achieved in the vicinity of such an inherent attractor even if some perturbation occurs
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