A shoe-tying paradigm was developed to examine mode effects and motor learning functions when peopleare asked to handle a familiar object (e.g., tying a shoe) using an unfamiliar coordination mode (e.g., tyinga shoe with another person). Dyads first tied a shoe apparatus using their own two hands (“bimanual”) for10 trials and then tied the shoe as a dyad, each person using one hand (“intermanual”) for 20 trials. Finally,participants tied the shoe bimanually for another 10 trials. Previous research has indicated that intermanualis faster than bimanual, but those experiments examined novel tasks performed by novices. For this familiartask, results revealed that participants were significantly slower in the intermanual mode compared to eitherset of bimanual trials, and participants were significantly faster in the second set of bimanual trials than thefirst. Unlike mode effects for novel tasks with novice participants, the intermanual mode was slowest,though intermanual performance may have enhanced subsequent bimanual performance. Previous researchon motor learning suggests an exponential function describes acquisition of a novel skill, whereas a powerlaw describes persistent motor learning. Analyses revealed that dyads exhibited a power law function overboth the first set of bimanual trials and the intermanual trials. That finding suggests that participants werenot learning a new coordination skill in the intermanual mode but may have transferred persistent,bimanual shoe-tying skill to the novel mode. Theoretical and practical implications of acquisition of anovel coordination mode for a familiar task are described.
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