Submitted on October 17, 2007
Accepted on February 28, 2008
Acquisition of the temporal and ordinal structure of movement sequences
in incidental learning
Jill Xanthe O'Reilly1*, Katharine J McCarthy2, Mariagrazia Capizzi3, and Anna Christina Nobre3
1 Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB), Oxford University, Oxford, Oxon, United Kingdom; Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, United Kingdom
2 Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, Oxford, Oxon, United Kingdom
3 Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, United Kingdom
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: joreilly{at}fmrib.ox.ac.uk.
We investigated the acquisition and integration of temporal and ordinal sequence information in an incidental learning model of motor skill acquisition (the serial reaction time task). Human participants were exposed to a stimulus-response sequence which had temporal structure, ordinal structure, or both. By changing the temporal or ordinal structure, or both, we were able to ask two questions: Firstly does a regular temporal structure facilitate learning of an ordinal sequence and secondly is a temporal sequence, presented in the context of a random ordinal sequence of finger movements, "picked up" through incidental learning? We found that a predictable temporal structure greatly facilitated the learning of an ordinal sequence, but was not learned when presented in isolation. The results suggest that in motor-skill acquisition under incidental learning conditions, timing is represented at a level specific to the ordinal sequence of movements rather than as an independent temporal template.
