Abstract/Summary

Skilled musicians can improvise with first-time partners. Thus, the question arises how the adaptability to others can emerge through the mutual motor learning experience.We developed a two-person cooperative visuomotor task; an object was connected through virtual springs with the cursors controlled by the subjects. We instructed paired subjects to jointly control the object toward a specified target under a virtual force field. Experimental results suggest that a novice subject who was trained with a skill-level matched peer in the Learning phase showed significantly better adaptability to others in the successive Evaluation phase. Variety of the cooperative experience with others in the visuomotor task probably gave rise to high adaptability in the novice-to-novice group subjects, while the learning experience with an expert did not. We conclude that the motor skills acquired during mutual interactions with peers can lead to have an ability to tune the motor commands subject to the dynamics of the external environment and the behavior of the partners.