ABSTRACT
Recent studies (Effken & Kadar, 2001; Kadar et al., 2002) have shown that diffuse control models provide promising alternative descriptions of exploratory learning. Specifically, within-trial measures revealed increasing goal-specific biases during learning, where movement control comprises randomness (diffusion) mixed with an increasing bias by target information (drift). Further finescale analyses of data from Kadar et al.’s (2002) study have indicated that additional global biases including the effect of handedness are also present during the early stages of learning. The present study examines the role of handedness as a spatial bias in exploratory learning in a 90-degree visual rotation task. The first experiment investigated the effect of handedness in the learning patterns of this task. The second experiment was a partial replication of Imamizu and Shimojo's (1995) experiment to assess whether intermanual transfer of a 90-degree transformation was indeed nearly 100%.
