School of Psychology, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom.
School of Computing, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2019 Feb 7;14(2):e0211706. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0211706. eCollection 2019.
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.
有些活动可以被有意义地划分为“认知”或“感觉运动”性质的，但也有很多活动不能。这对理解残疾活动受限具有根本意义。例如，老年人需要更长的时间来学习复杂序列的顺序，但他们的运动表现也更慢、更不稳定且不准确。那么，他们技能获取受损是认知缺陷还是运动缺陷？我们将序列学习建模为一个涉及有限容量缓冲区（工作记忆）的过程，其中表现降低会限制可以存储的元素数量。为了检验这个模型，我们研究了运动表现和序列学习之间的关系。实验 1 表明，老年人在学习复杂序列的顺序方面表现更差。实验 2 发现，当使用非惯用手时，参与者的序列学习会受到损害。实验 3 证实，当运动需求增加时（正如模型所预测的那样），序列学习会受到损害。强化学习框架可以解释这些结果，这些框架表明，序列学习将受到个体的感觉运动能力和认知能力的限制。
