Abstract
Practice with perceptual and motor skill tasks results in performance improvements mediated by procedural memory consolidation. In light of recently identified commonalities between perceptual and motor learning (Censor et al., 2012), the goal of the current study was to examine whether motor skill consolidation facilitates perceptual learning, pointing to interactions between the two learning domains. We hypothesized that consolidation of motor skill learning would initiate offline processes that may enable interaction with subsequent perceptual learning. An experimental design combining a saccade motor learning task with a typical visual texture discrimination task (TDT, Karni and Sagi, 1991) was used. On the first day, participants learned to execute a saccade towards a specific retinotopic location. Fixation starting point was randomly varied. Following consolidation of the motor skill and its retrieval, participants learned the visual TDT, in which they maintained fixation while a masked target occupied the same retinotopic location that was used in the saccade task. On the following day, subjects performed the TDT followed by the saccade task. The results showed learning gains in both motor and perceptual tasks. Strikingly, the between-day offline gains in perceptual thresholds were enhanced, compared to practice per se with the visual task. Furthermore, a positive correlation was found between the motor and perceptual improvements. Taken together, these results may indicate an interaction between different learning domains due to synchronized consolidation processes.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018