Abstract
Consolidation has been associated with performance gains without additional practice (i.e., off-line learning). However, the movement characteristics improving off-line remain poorly understood. To investigate this question, participants were trained to produce a sequence of planar reaching movements toward four different visual targets. The training session with feedback required them to learn the relative time of the movements, the total movement time and aim accurately at each target. The retention test was performed either 10-min or 24-h after. Results revealed that a 24-h consolidation interval did not result in better temporal or spatial accuracy. This finding suggests that off-line learning may be restricted to sequence production tasks in which the different segments must be regrouped (“chunked”) together to accelerate their execution.
Acknowledgments
We thank Luc Proteau for allowing us to use his experimental apparatus and Marcel Beaulieu for his assistance with the computer software.
Disclosure Statement
The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1 where is the prescribed time of the segment and is the actual movement time of the segment
2 where is the total movement time on trial and is the total number of sequences executed.
3 where is the total movement time on trial is the mean total movement time, and is the total number of sequences executed.