Learning and transfer as dynamical paradigms for behavioral change

Our window into the topic of learning is bimanual coordination to a visually-specified phase relationship. Previous research reveals that only a few phasing patterns are produced stably, which are mapped onto attractors of the system's intrinsic dynamics. Specific task constraints introduce behavioral information into the dynamics, attracting the system's behavior toward a required pattern. Learning is the process by which environmental behavioral information which defines the visuomotor pattern to be learned becomes memorized. Once learning is achieved, the memorized pattern constitutes an attractor of the behavioral pattern dynamics. The rational of the present experiments is to periodically probe the phase diagram (the set of all phasing relations) while a particular phasing pattern is practised