Welcome to the Presentation of
"Investigating Retention in Passive Haptic Learning of Piano Songs"
My Name is Erik Pescara
And my Co-Authors are Rumen Donchev and Michael Beigl.
Passive Haptic Learning is a phenomenon in which users can learn
motor skills through repeated haptic stimulation applied to the body
even though little to no attention is dedicated to learning.
A person is able to learn a motor skill while doing something else
like answering e-mails or playing video games.
In the past researchers had great success teaching
piano note sequences, drums and Braille
through Passive Haptic Learning.
The Research Question that we pose is
“How does the retention of passively learned material compare to actively learned material?”
This is important because a big part of learning
is the retention of the learned material.
For the purposes of this experiment
we used the hardware that you can see on the right:
an electronic keyboard
and a glove with motors placed above the proximal phalanges.
Our experiment design was based on
“Mobile music touch: Mobile tactile stimulation for passive learning”
with modifications to be able to test retention.
The experiment was conducted in two separate sessions,
three days apart.
In Session 1 participants learned the note sequences actively and passively
and three days later in Session 2 we tested the retention.
For the purposes of this study
we created 2 note sequences,
each consisting of 10 notes.
Both note sequences used the same 5 keys of the piano
and were in the same octave.
The note sequences had a 1-to1 Finger to Key mapping.
The participants learned the note sequences passively and actively.
In the active learning condition
we first played the note sequence to the participants,
which then had 3 attempts to repeat the note sequence.
If they achieved an accuracy of 90% or above
we considered this note sequence to be learned.
90% was chosen because we did not want the participants to overlearn.
If the participants were unable to play the sequence with 90% accuracy
at least 2 out of 3 attempts then he or she
entered into another learning cycle.
In the passive learning condition
the subjects first went into a 20 minute passive rehearsal phase.
After that we played the note sequence for them.
This was done in order to illustrate what was passively learned.
Afterwards the person had 3 attempts to repeat the note sequence.
If they achieved an accuracy of 90% or above
we considered this song to be learned.
If the subject was unable to play the sequence with 90% accuracy
at least 2 out of 3 attempts then
he or she entered into another learning cycle.
Because we wanted to measure the participant’s performance
we used Dynamic Time Warping
to calculate the number of mistakes on an attempt.
The “20-minute passive rehearsal” phase
consisted of the subjects playing the game “Gweled” for 20 minutes
while listening to the note sequence
and receiving passive haptic stimulation.
The game “Gweled” is a tile-matching puzzle game.
When we played the note sequence to the subject
we did not only play the audio recording
but also LEDs on the strip were highlighted
on the keys required to be pressed.
3 days later we conducted the second session
in which the participants were tested on their retention.
There were 2 sets of tests.
The first set dealt with unaided recall.
Participants recalled the note sequences
in the order that they learned them.
In the 2nd set of tests we gave the participants a little cue.
We played each note sequence for the participants once
and measured their recall after the cue.
The entire data set of participants consisted of 20 people.
2 individual subgroups could be defined as:
Novices: people who have not played piano,
but perhaps had some musical experience.
Finding people without musical experience proved difficult
due to school often introducing children to musical instruments.
Previous piano students who had experience
from one to ten years of piano playing.
Consistent with previous research,
passive learning took significantly fewer attempts.
The only exception is the “Previous Piano Students”
whose difference is not significant.
Unaided recall showed no significant difference
between actively and passively learned material.
However, after playing the note sequence for the subjects once,
passively learned material was recalled significantly better.
We could observe a significant difference in recall errors
when looking at all participants and when looking at Novices.
However, no significant difference in recall errors
could be found for Previous Piano Students.
In conclusion:
Unaided recall had no significant difference between
active and passive learning.
On the other hand, aided recall for passively learned material
was overall better.
On average 10% or 1 note better than
the actively learned material.
This suggests that Passive Haptic Learning could be mostly beneficial
for inexperienced people.
In Future Work we would like to increase the time between sessions
We would focus more on more granular subgroups for experience
And we would like to delve into Passive Learning
As a reinforcement technique.
Thank You for your attention and have a nice day.