Bimanual Manipulation in a Curve Editing Task

In this paper we investigate the relationship between bimanual (two handed) manipulation and the cognitive theories of task integration, divided attention and epistemic action. We explore these relationships by means of an empirical study based on a curve editing task. This task was designed on the principle of integrating the visual, conceptual and input device space domain of each hand's individual task. We provide evidence that this task has superior performance over a unimanual (one-handed) version. Furthermore, the experiment demonstrates that as the task becomes harder (i.e., more cognitively demanding) the bimanual technique exhibits even greater performance benefits over the unimanual technique. We argue that the design principles and performance improvements are generalizable to other task domains.