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Observing and Learning Complex Actions: On the Example of Guitar Playing

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Handbook of Human Motion

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Abstract

With very little effort or thought, we can understand the goals and intentions of other people we encounter in our daily lives through watching their movements. In this chapter, we discuss the action observation network (AON ), which is thought to be a key player in linking action perception, production, and understanding. We focus on two prominent theories of AON function and detail how different kinds of experience (namely, physical and visual experience) shape AON engagement. We then highlight work done by our laboratory and others that uses complex guitar and dance training paradigms to trace the emergence of experience-dependent plasticity in the human brain and behavior. This work highlights common and distinct neural signatures of visual and visuomotor learning and how such training paradigms can help to adjudicate between competing theories of AON function. The use of cutting edge methodological techniques is also evaluated, and we conclude with some considerations of implications for musicians and dancers and future directions for this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bangor University, Bangor, North Wales, UK

    Tom Gardner & Emily S. Cross

Authors
  1. Tom Gardner
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  2. Emily S. Cross
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Motion & More, Barcelona, Spain

    Bertram Müller

  2. Klinik für Orthopädie und Unfallchirurgi, Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Sebastian I. Wolf

  3. Institut for Biomechanics und Orthopedic, German Sport University Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Gert-Peter Brueggemann

  4. Houston, Texas, USA

    Zhigang Deng

  5. ACRISP, FedUniversity, Cremorne, New South Wales, Australia

    Andrew McIntosh

  6. Wilmington, Delaware, USA

    Freeman Miller

  7. Research, C-Motion, Inc., Germantown, Maryland, USA

    William Scott Selbie

Section Editor information

  1. Movement Analysis Laboratory, Clinic for Orthopedics and Trauma Surgery; Center for Orthopedics, Trauma Surgery and Spinal Cord Injury;Heidelberg University Hospital, Schlierbacher Landstr. 200a, 69118, Heidelberg, Germany

    Sebastian I. Wolf

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Gardner, T., Cross, E.S. (2017). Observing and Learning Complex Actions: On the Example of Guitar Playing. In: Müller, B., et al. Handbook of Human Motion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30808-1_191-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30808-1_191-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30808-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30808-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference EngineeringReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

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