Kinematic signatures of pedagogical communication
Abstract
One of the major benefits of joint action is for learning. By learning with or from other people, we expand our latent capacity for acquiring new skills or techniques that would be otherwise difficult to innovate individually, such as driving a car, tying knots, or playing an instrument. Communicating a skill to a naive learner involves energetic and opportunity costs to the teacher, making the efficiency of pedagogical communication a high priority during learning interactions. It is an open question how teachers approach pedagogical communication when their only experience of the skill is through individual learning, and the relationship between the movements that they have learned and the pedagogical modulations they make to teach. We present a study where participants first learned a motor timing task (Individual Learning) with two timing targets—absolute and relative timing—and then produced demonstrations emphasising one of the two targets. Results show considerable heterogeneity in Individual Learning outcomes of relative timing that was associated with specific kinematic features of participants’ movements. Furthermore, participants who learned this relative timing better then modulated these same kinematic parameters specifically when demonstrating the task for a new learner. Teachers recognise the task-relevant information they acquire through individual learning and strategically modulate this to communicate skills to naive learners.
