Age-related enhancement in visuomotor learning by a dual-task.

Many daily activities require performance of multiple tasks integrating cognitive and motor processes. While the fact that both processes go through deterioration and changes with aging has been generally accepted, not much is known about how aging interacts with stages of motor skill acquisition under a cognitively demanding situation. To address this question, we combined a visuomotor adaptation task with a secondary cognitive task. We made two primary findings beyond the expected age-related performance deterioration. First, while young adults showed classical dual-task cost in the early motor learning phase dominated by explicit processes, older adults instead strikingly displayed enhanced performance in the later stage, dominated by implicit processes. For older adults, the secondary task may have facilitated a shift to their relatively intact implicit learning processes that reduced reliance on their already-deficient explicit processes during visuomotor adaptation. Second, we demonstrated that consistently performing the secondary task in learning and re-learning phases can operate as an internal task-context and facilitate visuomotor memory retrieval later regardless of age groups. Therefore, our study demonstrated age-related similarities and differences in integrating concurrent cognitive load with motor skill acquisition which, may in turn, contributes to the understanding of a shift in balance across multiple systems.

Composite faces are not (necessarily) processed coactively: A test using systems factorial technology and logical-rule models.

Upright faces are thought to be processed more holistically than inverted faces. In the widely used composite face paradigm, holistic processing is inferred from interference in recognition performance from a to-be-ignored face half for upright and aligned faces compared with inverted or misaligned faces. We sought to characterize the nature of holistic processing in composite faces in computational terms. We use logical-rule models (Fific, Little, & Nosofsky, 2010) and Systems Factorial Technology (Townsend & Nozawa, 1995) to examine whether composite faces are processed through pooling top and bottom face halves into a single processing channel-coactive processing-which is one common mechanistic definition of holistic processing. By specifically operationalizing holistic processing as the pooling of features into a single decision process in our task, we are able to distinguish it from other processing models that may underlie composite face processing. For instance, a failure of selective attention might result even when top and bottom components of composite faces are processed in serial or in parallel without processing the entire face coactively. Our results show that performance is best explained by a mixture of serial and parallel processing architectures across all 4 upright and inverted, aligned and misaligned face conditions. The results indicate multichannel, featural processing of composite faces in a manner inconsistent with the notion of coactivity. (PsycINFO Database Record

Impaired visuomotor generalization by inconsistent attentional contexts.

In daily life, people are constantly presented with situations in which they have to learn and acquire new motor skills in complex environments, where attention is often distracted by other events. Being able to generalize and perform the acquired motor action in different environments is a crucial part of visuomotor learning. The current study examined whether attentional distraction impairs generalization of visuomotor adaptation or whether consistent distraction can operate as an internal cue to facilitate generalization. Using a dual-task paradigm combining visuomotor rotational adaptation and an attention-demanding secondary task, we showed that switching the attentional context from training (dual-task) to generalization (single-task) reduced the range of transfer of visuomotor adaptation to untrained directions. However, when consistent distraction was present throughout training and generalization, visuomotor generalization was equivalent to without distractions at all. Furthermore, this attentional context-dependent generalization was evident even when sensory modality of distractions differed between training and generalization. Therefore, the general nature of the dual tasks, rather than the specific stimuli, is associated with visuomotor memory and serves as a critical cue for generalization. Taken together, we demonstrated that attention plays a critical role during sensorimotor adaptation in selecting and associating multisensory signals with motor memory. This finding provides insight into developing learning programs that are generalizable in complex daily environments.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Learning novel motor actions in complex environments with attentional distraction is a critical function. Successful motor learning involves the ability to transfer the acquired skill from the trained to novel environments. Here, we demonstrate attentional distraction does not impair visuomotor adaptation. Rather, consistency in the attentional context from training to generalization modulates the degree of transfer to untrained locations. The role of attention and memory must, therefore, be incorporated into existing models of visuomotor learning.

Global Cue Inconsistency Diminishes Learning of Cue Validity.

In daily life, we make decisions that are associated with probabilistic outcomes (e.g., the chance of rain today). People search for and utilize information that validly predicts an outcome (i.e., we look for dark clouds to indicate the possibility of rain). In the current study (N = 107), we present a two-stage learning task that examines how participants learn and utilize predictive information within a probabilistic learning environment. In the first stage, participants select one of three cues that gives predictive information about the outcome of the second stage. Participants then use this information to predict the outcome in stage two, for which they receive feedback. Critically, only one of the three cues in stage one gives valid predictive information about the outcome in stage two. Participants must differentiate the valid from non-valid cues and select this cue on subsequent trials in order to inform their prediction of the outcome in stage two. The validity of this predictive information, however, is reinforced with varying levels of probabilistic feedback (i.e., 75, 85, 95, 100%). A second manipulation involved changing the consistency of the predictive information in stage one and the outcome in stage two. The results show that participants, with higher levels of probabilistic feedback, learned to utilize the valid cue. In inconsistent task conditions, however, participants were significantly less successful in utilizing higher validity cues. We interpret this result as implying that learning in probabilistic categorization is based on developing a representation of the task that allows for goal-directed action.