Effects of augmentative visual training on audio-motor mapping

• Combined visual–auditory feedback resulted in improved interface control.
• Visual feedback during training did not affect later auditory–motor performance.
• Augmentative visual feedback need not be employed in future experiments.

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of augmentative visual feedback training on auditory–motor performance. Thirty-two healthy young participants used facial surface electromyography (sEMG) to control a human–machine interface (HMI) for which the output was vowel synthesis. An auditory-only (AO) group (n = 16) trained with auditory feedback alone and an auditory–visual (AV) group (n = 16) trained with auditory feedback and progressively-removed visual feedback. Subjects participated in three training sessions and one testing session over 3 days. During the testing session they were given novel targets to test auditory–motor generalization. We hypothesized that the auditory–visual group would perform better on the novel set of targets than the group that trained with auditory feedback only. Analysis of variance on the percentage of total targets reached indicated a significant interaction between group and session: individuals in the AV group performed significantly better than those in the AO group during early training sessions (while using visual feedback), but no difference was seen between the two groups during later sessions. Results suggest that augmentative visual feedback during training does not improve auditory–motor performance.