Skill Learning and Skill Transfer Mediated by Cooperative Haptic Interaction

Abstract

It is known that physical coupling between two subjects may be advantageous in joint tasks. However, little is known about how two people mutually exchange information to exploit the coupling. Therefore, we adopted a reversed, novel perspective to the standard one that focuses on the ability of physically coupled subjects to adapt to cooperative contexts that require negotiating a common plan: we investigated how training in pairs on a novel task affects the development of motor skills of each of the interacting partners. The task involved reaching movements in an unstable dynamic environment using a bilateral non-linear elastic tool that could be used bimanually or dyadically. The main result is that training with an expert leads to the greatest performance in the joint task. However, the performance in the individual test is strongly affected by the initial skill level of the partner. Moreover, practicing with a peer rather than an expert appears to be more advantageous for a naive; and motor skills can be transferred to a bimanual context, after training with an expert, only if the non-expert subject had prior experience of the dynamics of the novel task.

Haptic Human-Human Interaction Through a Compliant Connection Does Not Improve Motor Learning in a Force Field

“…counteracting the force field). We are not the first to do this: a recent study showed that human-human haptic interaction can be studied in a task in which participants performed a balancing task with unstable dynamics [2]. Furthermore, pilot tests and previous work [5] indicated that force fields can be used for motor learning assessment and yield significant motor learning, albeit with improvements in the order of millimeters, which is also confirmed by our results.…”

“…Second, the initial individual motor learning rate of interacting partners was faster. Results of another study, in which participants performed an unstable balancing task, suggested that haptic interaction does not increase motor learning rate and improves individual performance only under certain conditions [2]. However, to our knowledge, no further studies have been conducted to specifically investigate the benefits of interaction on motor learning or whether these benefits generalize to other motor learning tasks, for instance whether interaction benefits learning to perform a tracking task in a novel dynamic environment.…”

“…Social interaction through gaming has shown improvement in motor learning, for instance because it makes the task more fun and motivating [3,8]. Haptic interaction -interaction through exerting forces onto each other -has only recently gained academic interest [10,6,12,15,16,2,11].…”

Perspectives and Challenges in Robotic Neurorehabilitation

“…The last aspect that is worth considering is the recent trend of training patients and/or therapists together, in groups or at least in couples (i.e., dyads). This synergy can be collaborative and/or competitive with a double goal: In the case of two patients training with the robot jointly, it brings improvement in the efficacy of the treatment through maximization of their motivation [154,155]; in the case of a therapist who performs a training jointly with a patient, it brings to an improvement of the generalization capabilities of the patient [156,157].…”

Force accuracy rather than high stiffness is associated with faster learning and reduced falls in human balance

“…For unstable tasks involving the upper limbs, two extreme strategies were observed 7,8,12 . The first strategy (high-stiffness strategy) implies the production of a convergent, restoring force field, taking advantage of the elastic properties of the body/environment system.…”