Roy de Kleijn - The learning of sequential action: results from a new paradigm and possible models

Sequence learning could be argued to be the most essential cognitive ability, for most of our daily behavior consists of sequential actions: from walking, cooking, and cleaning to spoken and written language. Consequently, sequence learning has been the topic of many studies, with widely varying approaches ranging from implicit sequence learning to language acquisition and typing. In the extensive area of implicit learning research, an important paradigm has been the serial reaction time (SRT) task, which asks subjects to press 4 buttons in a series, as indicated by corresponding lights in a sequence that repeats–unbeknownst to them–every 10 presses. Subjects trained on this repeating sequence developed faster reaction times over the course of training, as compared to a control group responding to a random sequence of stimuli. The SRT paradigm has been cited as evidence for implicit learning, as subjects in the repeating condition, despite speeding up, are unaware of the sequence when later asked. We extended this paradigm into a mouse trajectory task, which allows us to investigate the temporal dynamics of sequence learning. This study has discovered some interesting results, and I will discuss some of them, together with a discussion of some cognitive models that could explain our data.