Tanaka Kanji, Watanabe Katsumi
Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda UniversityTokyo, Japan.
Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of TokyoTokyo, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jun 13;8:937. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00937. eCollection 2017.
Through practice, people are able to integrate a secondary sequence (e.g., a stimulus-based sequence) into a primary sequence (e.g., a response-based sequence), but it is still controversial whether the integrated sequences lead to better learning than only the primary sequence. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the effects of a sequence that integrated space and color sequences on early and late learning phases (corresponding to effector-independent and effector-dependent learning, respectively) and how the effects differed in the integrated and primary sequences in each learning phase. In the task, the participants were required to learn a sequence of button presses using trial-and-error and to perform the sequence successfully for 20 trials ( × task). First, in the baseline task, all participants learned a non-colored sequence, in which the response button always turned red. Then, in the learning task, the participants were assigned to two groups: a colored sequence group (i.e., space and color) or a non-colored sequence group (i.e., space). In the colored sequence, the response button turned a pre-determined color and the participants were instructed to attend to the sequences of both location and color as much as they could. The results showed that the participants who performed the colored sequence acquired the correct button presses of the sequence earlier, but showed a slower mean performance time than those who performed the non-colored sequence. Moreover, the slower performance time in the colored sequence group remained in a subsequent transfer task in which the spatial configurations of the buttons were vertically mirrored from the learning task. These results indicated that if participants explicitly attended to both the spatial response sequence and color stimulus sequence at the same time, they could develop their spatial representations of the sequence earlier (i.e., early development of the effector-independent learning), but might not be able to enhance their motor representations of the sequence (i.e., late development of the effector-dependent learning). Thus, the undeveloped effector-dependent representations in the colored sequence group directly led to a long performance time in the transfer sequence.
通过练习，人们能够将次级序列（例如，基于刺激的序列）整合到初级序列（例如，基于反应的序列）中，但整合后的序列是否比仅使用初级序列能带来更好的学习效果仍存在争议。在本研究中，我们旨在探究整合了空间和颜色序列的序列对早期和晚期学习阶段（分别对应效应器独立学习和效应器依赖学习）的影响，以及在每个学习阶段中，整合序列和初级序列的效果有何不同。在该任务中，参与者需要通过试错学习一系列按键操作，并成功执行该序列20次（×任务）。首先，在基线任务中，所有参与者学习一个无颜色的序列，其中响应按钮总是变红。然后，在学习任务中，参与者被分为两组：彩色序列组（即空间和颜色）或无颜色序列组（即空间）。在彩色序列中，响应按钮会变成预先确定的颜色，并且参与者被指示尽可能多地关注位置和颜色的序列。结果表明，执行彩色序列的参与者更早地掌握了序列的正确按键操作，但与执行无颜色序列的参与者相比，其平均执行时间较慢。此外，彩色序列组较慢的执行时间在随后的迁移任务中仍然存在，在该迁移任务中，按钮的空间配置与学习任务中的垂直镜像。这些结果表明，如果参与者同时明确关注空间响应序列和颜色刺激序列，他们可以更早地发展序列的空间表征（即效应器独立学习的早期发展），但可能无法增强序列的运动表征（即效应器依赖学习的晚期发展）。因此，彩色序列组中未发展的效应器依赖表征直接导致了迁移序列中的长时间执行。
