For over 40 years, the contextual interference effect in motor learning has been investigated. While the difference between levels of contextual interference experienced under blocked and random practice are well established, the difference in the levels of contextual interference experienced under serial and random practice is still ambiguous.…

When learning procedures in real life, learners generally use action atomization strategies (interleaving instructions consultation and execution) and need several repetitions to acquire the skill. However, in studies on procedural learning, delayed execution paradigms (2 separate steps consisting of instructions consultation, then execution)…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties acquiring the grammatical rules of their native language. It has been proposed that children's detection of sequential statistical patterns correlates with grammatical proficiency and hence that a deficit in the detection of these regularities may underlie the difficulties with…

Learning sequential structures is of fundamental importance for a wide variety of human skills. While it has long been debated whether implicit sequence learning is perceptual or response-based, here we propose an alternative framework that cuts across this dichotomy and assumes that sequence learning rests on associative changes that can occur…

We investigated procedural learning in 18 children with basal ganglia (BG) lesions or dysfunctions of various aetiologies, using a visuo-motor learning test, the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task, and a cognitive learning test, the Probabilistic Classification Learning (PCL) task. We compared patients with early (less than 1 year old, n=9), later…

In almost all daily activities fingers of both hands are used in coordinated succession. The present experiments explored whether learning in such tasks pertains not only to the overall sequence spanning both hands but also to the constituent sequences of each hand. In a serial reaction time task, 2 repeating hand-related sequences were…

A four-component aiming movement was used to examine the relative effectiveness of part and whole practice. Following a pretest, participants were assigned to one of three practice groups. Participants in a "Whole" group practiced the four components together as a unit. A "No Overlap" group practiced the first two and last two components of the…

Nonsense syllables and two-arm semaphore" positions were the tasks in this study of experience free learning. (MB)

Results of these five experiments span serial pattern learning, perception of sequential patterns, and coordinated motor skill. (Authors/CB)

Younger (age 20-35) veterans showed better performance on learning and psychomotor tasks than did older (age 55-70) veterans. Positive attitudes toward aging, and greater life satisfaction were associated with better performance on the behavioral tasks in the older group. Results suggest age-related behavior may be related to psychosocial…