As yet underdeveloped is the psychology of human learning as it pertains to manual control tasks in fully dynamic, multi-degree-of-freedom domains. While we currently possess the capacity to teach these tasks, we are unable to predict how well people will do in these domains or how rapidly they will learn.

Virtual fixtures, shared controllers and other haptic guidance schemes have been supplement with virtual motor tasks in order to improve performance and skill retention and to reduce training duration and user workload. In an error-reducing shared controller implemented in our lab, the performance of a manual task was influenced by participants’ ability to identify and then excite a virtual two-mass system at the natural frequency of the system.