Recently, bimanual coordination tasks with temporal constraints, such as polyrhythmic tapping, have been approached from two theoretically distinguished viewpoints. These are cognitive and dynamical approaches. However, there are situations that can not be explained by only one of the two approaches. The purposes of this study were to identify learning strategies adopted by subjects in the production of 5 : 3 polyrhythm, and to clarify the timing mechanisms of coordinating two hands by integrating the two approaches. Ten out of twenty subjects could learn 5 : 3 polyrhythmic tapping in a synchronized task and reproduce it in a test task. Learning strategies adopted by subjects were identified by deviations of observed interresponse intervals (IRIs) from expected IRIs and correlations between the adjacent IRIs. Results showed that an integrated chained organization was adopted in the first half of one cycle, whereas an integrated hierarchical organization was adopted in the last half of the same cycle. This indicated that one cycle of polyrhythm was separated into two units, and was performed with the two different strategies. These strategies were discussed in terms of a cognitive attentional perspective and a dynamical entrainment property of coupled nonlinear oscillators
