RESEARCH ARTICLE Learning a coordinated rhythmic movement with task- appropriate coordination feedback Andrew D. Wilson • Winona Snapp-Childs • Rachel Coats • Geoffrey P. Bingham Received: 30 April 2010 / Accepted: 28 July 2010 / Published online: 12 August 2010 Ó Springer-Verlag 2010 Abstract A common perception–action learning task is to teach participants to produce a novel coordinated rhythmic movement, e.g. 90° mean relative phase. As a general rule, people cannot produce these novel move- ments stably without training. This is because they are extremely poor at discriminating the perceptual informa- tion required to coordinate and control the movement, which means people require additional (augmented) feed- back to learn the novel task. Extant methods (e.g. visual metronomes, Lissajous figures) work, but all involve transforming the perceptual information about the task and thus altering the perception–action task dynamic being studied. We describe and test a new method for providing online augmented coordination feedback using a neutral colour cue. This does not alter the perceptual information or the overall task dynamic, and an experiment confirms that (a) feedback is required for learning a novel coordi- nation and (b) the new feedback method provides the necessary assistance. This task-appropriate augmented feedback therefore allows us to study the process of learning while preserving the perceptual information that constitutes a key part of the task dynamic being studied. This method is inspired by and supports a fully perception– action approach to coordinated rhythmic movement. Keywords Perception–action  Coordinated rhythmic movement  Augmented feedback  Learning Introduction A key model task for studying human movement is coor- dinated rhythmic movement, first described by Kelso (1981). The task is simply to coordinate rhythmic move- ments (of limbs, or pendulums, or stimuli on a computer screen) at some mean relative phase. In general, people can only produce two stable coordination patterns without training, specifically 0° and 180°. Other patterns (e.g. 90°) can, but must, be learned (see Kelso 1995 for a useful overview). These characteristic phenomena have been described from a dynamic pattern perspective. Behaviour is said to be organized with respect to the order parameter relative phase; 0° and 180° are attractors in this space and are described in terms of homologous muscle activation (Haken et al. 1985; Kelso 1995). Learning a novel coor- dinated movement entailed the creation of a new attractor at the target relative phase, in competition with the two intrinsic states (Zanone and Kelso 1994). From this per- spective, the specifics of the feedback display are not critical, so long as it supports the acquisition of stable movement; stability is the organizing principle (Tallet et al. 2008). However, there is now extensive evidence that the coupling entailed by coordination is perceptual and that behaviour is actually organized with respect to the infor- mation for relative phase 1 : 1. The phenomena persist when the coordination is performed between people (e.g. Schmidt et al. 1990; A. D. Wilson (&) Centre for Sport and Exercise Sciences, Institute of Membrane and Systems Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK e-mail: A.D.Wilson@leeds.ac.uk W. Snapp-Childs  R. Coats  G. P. Bingham Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA 1 The stability of any specific coordinated movement is determined by multiple constraints (e.g. muscle homology; Li et al. 2004), but the underlying structure (as described by the HKB model; Haken et al. 1985) comes from the coordination requirement, which necessarily entails perception. 123 Exp Brain Res (2010) 205:513–520 DOI 10.1007/s00221-010-2388-y