Self-organized criticality and learning a new coordination task

The purpose of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that a self-organized criticality (SOC) practice condition would have a higher improvement rate in performance outcome than a typical progressive difficulty of practice regimen. The roller ball task was used where participants undergo a phase transition from failure to successful performance after sufficient practice. The findings from two experiments showed that the SOC condition had the fastest rate of improvement and the highest performance success level. The success probability in the SOC practice regime was close to the theoretically predicted value of 50%. It appears that the SOC practice condition – by scaling task difficulty to skill level in a self-controlled adaptive strategy – facilitates the learning of new movement coordination pattern by keeping the participant close to the parameter region of the transition of the movement dynamics.

► Two practice regimens were compared using a roller ball motor task in 2 experiments.
► Performers undergo a phase transition in practicing the roller ball task.
► The SOC condition had a faster improvement rate than the PID conditions.
► The SOC condition also had a higher success rate than the PID conditions.