Across-task binding: The development of a representation in learning a continuous movement sequence

Abstract

Across-task binding is defined as the stimulus/response of one task being linked to the response of another task. The purpose of the present experiment was to determine across-task binding in a continuous movement sequence task with an auditory task of high and low pitch tones and the development of a movement sequence representation. According to the two systems theory of sequence learning, we expected that the developed representation in the across-task binding context relies on the multi-dimensional system rather than on the unidimensional system which is restricted to a set of modules where each module processed information along one task/dimension. An inter-manual transfer design was used to disentangle the sequence representations. The mirror transfer test required the same pattern of muscle activation and joint angles (motor coordinates) in the contralateral limb as experienced during the acquisition phase, while in the nonmirror transfer test, the visual-spatial locations (spatial coordinates) of the target waveform were reinstated. The main finding was that consistently combining visual-spatial positions in a sequence and auditory dimensions such as the tone pitch does not rely on a multidimensional system as predicted by the two-systems theory.