The effects of adjusting task difficulty on learning motor and cognitive aspects of a multitasking task

摘要

Therapists have begun using musical techniques to teach motor skills in therapy sessions. To simulate these efforts, we have developed an app game that uses musical therapy techniques to teach simple tapping sequences to participants. Seven unique tapping sequences with varying levels of difficulty were taught to 208 participants. Two performance metrics were measured: (1) how quickly participants learned the correct number of taps in the sequence and (2) how quickly participants learned the correct frequency to tap the sequence. The first performance metric is a counting task, which is a cognitive function. The second performance metric is the speed at which the participant must move, which is a motor function. The results of our experiment show that when the difficulty of the tapping sequence was adjusted, participants learned the cognitive portion of the task more quickly when the task was simpler and the motor portion of the task more quickly when the task was more difficult. These trends were statistically significant with p-values <; 0.05. Our experiment suggests that in context of teaching a simple tapping sequence, participants are multitasking cognitive and motor aspects of the task, as they multitask motor and cognitive skills while learning rehabilitation exercises in therapeutic settings. If these benefits could be transferred to a stroke survivor population in a therapeutic setting, an expedited recovery could be realized by stroke survivors, allowing them to regain motor functions, and therefore daily living activities, more quickly.