Transition between individually different and common features in skilled drumming movements

Why do professional athletes and musicians exhibit individually different motion patterns? For example, baseball pitchers generate various pitching forms, e.g., variable wind-up, cocking, and follow-through forms. However, they commonly rotate their wrists and fingers at increasingly high speeds via shoulder and trunk motions. Despite the universality of common and individually different motion patterns in skilled movements, the abovementioned question remains unanswered. Here, we focus on a motion required to hit a snare drum, including the indirect phase of task achievement (i.e., the early movement and mid-flight phases) and the direct phase of task achievement (i.e., the hit phase). We apply tensor decomposition to collected kinematic data for the drum-hitting motion, enabling us to decompose high-dimensional and time-varying motion data into individually different and common movement patterns. As a result, individually different motion patterns emerge during the indirect phase of task achievement, and common motion patterns are evident in the direct phase of task achievement. Athletes and musicians are thus possibly allowed to perform individually different motion patterns during the indirect phase of task achievement. Additionally, they are required to exhibit common patterns during the direct phase of task achievement

Synchronization Error of Drum Kit Playing with a Metronome at Different Tempi by Professional Drummers

THE PRESENT STUDY EXAMINED THE SYNCHRONIZATION error (SE) of drum kit playing by professional drummers with an auditory metronome, focusing on the effects of motor effectors and tempi. Fifteen professional drummers attempted to synchronize a basic drumming pattern with a metronome as precisely as possible at tempi of 60, 120, and 200 beats per minute (bpm). In the 60 and 120 bpm conditions, the right hand (high-hat cymbals) showed small mean SE (∼2 ms), whereas the left hand (snare drum) and right foot (bass drum) preceded the metronome by about 10 ms. In the 200 bpm condition, the right hand was delayed by about 10 ms relative to the metronome, whereas the left hand and right foot showed small SE (∼1 ms). The absolute values of SE were smaller than those reported in previous tapping studies. In addition, the time series of SE were significantly correlated across the motor effectors, suggesting that each limb synchronized in relation to the other limbs rather than independently with the metronome

トクシマ コウエン トクシマ チュウオウ コウエン ノ ゾウエン セッケイ ニツイテ : ヒビヤ コウエン オヨビ ザイファースドルフジョウ トノ ヒカク

Tokushima Park (originally named Tokushima Central Park) is the Japan’s second western-style park that was opened in 1906. We investigated landscape architecture of Tokushima Park based on a blueprint made in 1905 to understand its purpose and function of the park, and compared with Hibiya Park that is the Japan’s first western-style park. Tokushima Park consisted of five areas. The central area included Mt. Shiroyama (Castle Mountain), and primeval forest was protected without allowing to make a big building within the area. A commercial museum, an athletic field, and a botanical garden and a library were placed in the southern, western and eastern areas respectively, so that each area was designed to exhibit each function. Tokushima Park and Hibiya Park were designed by the same two persons Seiroku Honda and Takanori Hongo. The two parks were equipped with a wide road, an athletic field, a botanical garden and so on, and these facilities were adopted to the park made since them. Because Seiroku Honda adopted three design drawings of German parks from the book Gärtnerisches Planzeichnen into a blueprint of Hibiya Park, we investigated the book to ascertain whether any design drawing was also used in Tokushima Park. We found that Seifersdorf Castle, the castle of count Brühl that was built at Seifersdorf in Germany in 13th century, is similar to the southern area of Tokushima Park

Adaptation to Visual Feedback Delay Influences Visuomotor Learning

Computational theory of motor control suggests that the brain continuously monitors motor commands, to predict their sensory consequences before actual sensory feedback becomes available. Such prediction error is a driving force of motor learning, and therefore appropriate associations between motor commands and delayed sensory feedback signals are crucial. Indeed, artificially introduced delays in visual feedback have been reported to degrade motor learning. However, considering our perceptual ability to causally bind our own actions with sensory feedback, demonstrated by the decrease in the perceived time delay following repeated exposure to an artificial delay, we hypothesized that such perceptual binding might alleviate deficits of motor learning associated with delayed visual feedback. Here, we evaluated this hypothesis by investigating the ability of human participants to adapt their reaching movements in response to a novel visuomotor environment with 3 visual feedback conditions—no-delay, sudden-delay, and adapted-delay. To introduce novelty into the trials, the cursor position, which originally indicated the hand position in baseline trials, was rotated around the starting position. In contrast to the no-delay condition, a 200-ms delay was artificially introduced between the cursor and hand positions during the presence of visual rotation (sudden-delay condition), or before the application of visual rotation (adapted-delay condition). We compared the learning rate (representing how the movement error modifies the movement direction in the subsequent trial) between the 3 conditions. In comparison with the no-delay condition, the learning rate was significantly degraded for the sudden-delay condition. However, this degradation was significantly alleviated by prior exposure to the delay (adapted-delay condition). Our data indicate the importance of appropriate temporal associations between motor commands and sensory feedback in visuomotor learning. Moreover, they suggest that the brain is able to account for such temporal associations in a flexible manner

Simultaneous processing of information on multiple errors in visuomotor learning.

The proper association between planned and executed movements is crucial for motor learning because the discrepancies between them drive such learning. Our study explored how this association was determined when a single action caused the movements of multiple visual objects. Participants reached toward a target by moving a cursor, which represented the right hand's position. Once every five to six normal trials, we interleaved either of two kinds of visual perturbation trials: rotation of the cursor by a certain amount (±15°, ±30°, and ±45°) around the starting position (single-cursor condition) or rotation of two cursors by different angles (+15° and -45°, 0° and 30°, etc.) that were presented simultaneously (double-cursor condition). We evaluated the aftereffects of each condition in the subsequent trial. The error sensitivity (ratio of the aftereffect to the imposed visual rotation) in the single-cursor trials decayed with the amount of rotation, indicating that the motor learning system relied to a greater extent on smaller errors. In the double-cursor trials, we obtained a coefficient that represented the degree to which each of the visual rotations contributed to the aftereffects based on the assumption that the observed aftereffects were a result of the weighted summation of the influences of the imposed visual rotations. The decaying pattern according to the amount of rotation was maintained in the coefficient of each imposed visual rotation in the double-cursor trials, but the value was reduced to approximately 40% of the corresponding error sensitivity in the single-cursor trials. We also found a further reduction of the coefficients when three distinct cursors were presented (e.g., -15°, 15°, and 30°). These results indicated that the motor learning system utilized multiple sources of visual error information simultaneously to correct subsequent movement and that a certain averaging mechanism might be at work in the utilization process

Interaction between Idea-generation and Idea-externalization Processes inArtistic Creation: Study of an Expert Breakdancer

This study develops a cognitive model to explain the processof artistic creation in a dance domain. Many researchers in thefield of psychology and cognitive science have investigatedthe process of creativity and developed various theories thatexplain this process. Their efforts have mostly focused onhigher cognitive functions of artists and scientists. However,in recent years, several studies that have highlighted theimportance of the interaction between idea generation andidea externalization processes suggest that people can findand develop new aspects of images and ideas by perceivingand reflecting on the images and ideas they externalize. Thisstudy develops a cognitive model that explains this interactionprocess in dance creation by referring to a famous theory ofmotor learning, the closed-loop model. We also investigatedance creation of an expert breakdancer and check thevalidity of our proposed model