Skill acquisition as a function of age, hand and task difficulty: Interactions between cognition and action

• Published in: PloS one 2019-02, Vol.14 (2), p.e0211706-e0211706
• Main Authors: Raw, Rachael K, Wilkie, Richard M, Allen, Richard J, Warburton, Matthew, Leonetti, Matteo, Williams, Justin H G, Mon-Williams, Mark
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Adults; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Analysis; Biology and Life Sciences; Brain research; Cognition; Cognition & reasoning; Cognition - physiology; Cognitive ability; Cognitive tasks; Elderly; Female; Hand - physiology; Human performance; Humans; Machine learning; Male; Medicine and Health Sciences; Memory; Memory, Short-Term - physiology; Middle Aged; Model testing; Motor learning; Motor skill learning; Motor Skills - physiology; Motor task performance; Motors; Neuropsychological Tests; Neurosciences; Older people; People and Places; Psychological aspects; Psychology; Reaction Time - physiology; Reinforcement, Psychology; Sensorimotor system; Serial Learning - physiology; Short term memory; Social Sciences; Task Performance and Analysis; Young Adult
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0211706

Some activities can be meaningfully dichotomised as 'cognitive' or 'sensorimotor' in nature-but many cannot. This has radical implications for understanding activity limitation in disability. For example, older adults take longer to learn the serial order of a complex sequence but also exhibit slower, more variable and inaccurate motor performance. So is their impaired skill acquisition a cognitive or motor deficit? We modelled sequence learning as a process involving a limited capacity buffer (working memory), where reduced performance restricts the number of elements that can be stored. To test this model, we examined the relationship between motor performance and sequence learning. Experiment 1 established that older adults were worse at learning the serial order of a complex sequence. Experiment 2 found that participants showed impaired sequence learning when the non-preferred hand was used. Experiment 3 confirmed that serial order learning is impaired when motor demands increase (as the model predicted). These results can be captured by reinforcement learning frameworks which suggest sequence learning will be constrained both by an individual's sensorimotor ability and cognitive capacity.