Abstract
Sensorimotor representations of movement sequences are hierarchically organized. Here we test the effects of different stimulus modalities on such organizations. In the visual group, participants responded to a repeated sequence of visually presented stimuli by depressing spatially compatible keys on a response pad. In the auditory group, learners were required to respond to auditorily presented stimuli, which had no direct spatial correspondence with the response keys: the lowest pitch corresponded to the leftmost key and the highest pitch to the rightmost key. We demonstrate that hierarchically and auto-organized sensorimotor representations are developed through practice, which are specific both to individuals and stimulus modalities. These findings highlight the dynamic and sensory-specific modulation of chunk processing during sensorimotor learning – sensorimotor chunking – and provide evidence that modality-specific mechanisms underlie the hierarchical organization of sequence representations.
Highlights
In daily life we are surrounded by multiple sources of sensory information (Robertson and Pascual-Leone, 2001)
Understanding the ability to integrate and represent behaviorally relevant sensory information devoted to action production is a central issue in the sensorimotor control and learning literature (e.g., Robertson and Pascual-Leone, 2001; Abrahamse et al, 2009; see Abrahamse et al, 2010, for review; Boutin et al, 2010)
Post hoc analysis indicated that both groups improved their performance from Block 1 to Block 14
Summary
In daily life we are surrounded by multiple sources of sensory information (Robertson and Pascual-Leone, 2001). Understanding the ability to integrate and represent behaviorally relevant sensory information devoted to action production is a central issue in the sensorimotor control and learning literature (e.g., Robertson and Pascual-Leone, 2001; Abrahamse et al, 2009; see Abrahamse et al, 2010, for review; Boutin et al, 2010). Insights into how the brain represents sensorimotor skills are provided by sequence learning paradigms (e.g., Verwey, 2001; Verwey et al, 2010) These paradigms are highly suitable for the study of the organization of relevant environmental information for action production (e.g., Boutin et al, 2010). In theory, processing within a motor chunk is considered to be carried out automatically by the motor system, while processing between motor chunks is thought to be controlled by the cognitive system (e.g., Rushworth et al, 2004; Sakai et al, 2004)
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