Modality-specific organization in the representation of sensorimotor sequences

Abstract

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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-organised 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.

Keywords

• sequence learning
• chunking
• Sensorimotor representation
• Stimulus modality
• Implicit/Explicit learning
• Implicit/Explicit processing