Performance of simultaneous motion and respiration control under guidance of audio-haptic cues

Compared with single-modal sensorimotor task, cross-modal sensorimotor tasks such as Tai Chi are more complex because they require simultaneous control of joint motion and respiration. In this paper, we compared the performance of single and multi-sensory cues in single-modal and cross-modal tasks. The experimental results showed that for single-modal task of two joint motions, the performance of using both audio and vibrotactile cues was slightly worse than that of using single-sensory cues where both joints were guided by vibrotactile cues, which implied that the single-sensory cue was more suitable for the single-modal motor tasks while the multi-sensory cues might produce distraction to participants. For simultaneous control of joint motion and respiration, the multiple sensory cues produced better performance than the single sensory cues. The results implied that multi-sensory cues were more effective than single sensory cues in reducing mental workload when learning complex cross-modal motor tasks.