Human brain performance in learning complex temporal patterns

This paper presents the experiments investigating the healthy adult human brain performance on motor tasks with simple and complex temporal patterns. A 2DOF manipulandum and a set of interactive computer games were used in this study. The games consist of a falling target that should be caught under different temporal constraints that change in every new trial by a change in the target's falling rate. Target's falling rate pattern included: linearly incremental, 2^nd order polynomial and random. These patterns were tested on 10 healthy adult subjects and the outcomes were compared with respect to their association with the actual falling target's pattern. Results show the best and the worst observed performances to belong to linearly incremental and random games, respectively.