Multisensory Congruency Enhances Explicit Awareness in a Sequence Learning Task

Abstract

We examined the effect of audiovisual training on learning a repeated sequence of motor responses. Participants were trained with either congruent or incongruent audiovisual cues to produce motor responses. Learning was tested by comparing reaction times to untrained sequences and by asking participants to recreate the trained sequence. A strong association was found between the two measures and the majority of high-scoring participants belonged to the congruent audiovisual condition. Because the second measure requires explicit knowledge of the trained sequence, we conclude that audiovisual congruency facilitates explicit learning.