Motor Chunking During Sequence Learning in Grid-Navigation Tasks
Abstract
Several canonical experimental paradigms (serial reaction task, mxn task, etc.) have been proposed to study the typi-cal behavioural phenomena in a sequential motor key-press task. The repeated execution of visuomotor sequences insuch paradigms lead to overall performance improvement such that the inter-response intervals in between certain sub-sequences decreases as compared to that across other sub-sequences. This efficient and hierarchical cluster organisation iscalled motor chunking. We provide empirical evidence for motor chunking in grid-navigation sequencing tasks. The par-ticipants performed Grid-Sailing Task (GST) [Fermin et. al., 2010] that required navigating a 10x10 grid from start to goalposition while using a particular key-mapping between the 3 cursor movement directions and the 3 keyboard buttons. Thisstudy confirms the emergence of subject-specific, unique temporal patterns related to chunking after substantial practice.