Movement Sequence Learning: Cognitive Processing Demands to Develop a Response Structure.

Christina Pfeifer,Stefan Panzer,Julia Harenz,Charles H. Shea

doi:10.5334/joc.128

Abstract

An experiment was designed to investigate the impact of a dual-task on the response structure of a 16-element movement sequence. The primary task was to move a lever to targets sequentially presented horizontally on the screen by elbow extension/flexion movements. The secondary task was a simple reaction time task triggered by moving the lever through targets at the middle and the end of the sequence. Participants were permitted to acquire the movement sequence on one day, and to perform the sequence on a second day under single-task and dual-task conditions. The results of the acquisition phase indicated that participants increased their performance over practice. Day 2 analysis indicated that performance of the repeated sequence was not deteriorated by the dual-task. This finding indicated that the response structure of the movement sequence performance was stable with regard to the secondary task. The current results are partially consistent with the theoretical assumption of an abstract representation for movement sequence execution.

Highlights

Previous research has shown that zero crossings in the acceleration trace, other than the minimal number required to accommodate the required reversals in the movement sequence, tend to cluster around points in the sequence where participants transition from one subsequence to the
Examples of kinematics displacements for a single participant during acquisition are displayed in Figures 2A and 2B
A 16-element movement sequence was practiced for 150 trials under a single-task condition

Summary

Introduction

Participants become less reactive to the visually presented elements, because they can anticipate the upcoming element in the sequence (Vieluf, Massing, Blandin, Leinen, & Panzer, 2015). One prominent theoretical explanation for the decreased element duration is that during practice participants started to “chunk” or “package” (Verwey, 1999; Sakai et al, 2003) two or more individual elements in a movement sequence together. This suggests that groups of elements are executed as relatively independent subsequences (Muehlbauer et al, 2007). The delay prior to the first element in a subsequence was thought to occur because the subsequence had to be retrieved, programmed, and/or otherwise readied for execution

Methods

Results

Conclusion