Attentional Demand of a Movement Sequence Guided by Visual-Spatial and by Motor Representations

Abstract

The objective of the experiment was to assess the change in attentional demands of a movement sequence guided by visual-spatial and motor representations across practice sessions in a dual-task probe paradigm. Participants were randomly assigned to either a 1-day or 2-day practice group. Following acquisition of the motor sequence task, participants first conducted a retention test and then four inter-manual transfer tests under single and dual-task conditions. The probe task was a simple reaction time. The inter-manual transfer tests, consisting of a mirror and non-mirror test, examined the development of the motor and visual-spatial representation, respectively. The results indicated that both representations guided the movement sequence and required attention. The attentional demands did not change with additional practice.

Keywords:

• attention
• dual-task
• sequence learning
• sequence representation

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

Declaration of competing interest: none

Notes

1 An equivalence test, a two-one sided test (TOST), was conducted for the RTs of the mirror and non-mirror transfer test (Lakens, 2017; Lakens et al., 2018). The TOST was performed with Jamovi 2.2.5 and the TOSTER package for paired samples. Cohen’s d as a standardized effect size was calculated by using G*power 3.1 (test family: t-Test; statistical test: means difference between two dependent means; type of power analysis: sensitivity) with given sample size (n = 26), power of 80% and an alpha level of 5% (Faul et al., 2007). This resulted in a Cohen’s d of 0.50 and was set as the smallest effect size of interest. Equivalence testing is based on t-statistic. Therefore, the TOST procedure t-Test for paired samples had the equivalence bounds of Δ_L = -.50 and Δ_U = .50. The resulting effect size is significantly higher than the lower bound Δ_L, t(25) = 1.79, p = .043 and significantly lower than the higher bound Δ_U, t(25) = -3.31, p = .001. This indicated that the RTs difference in the mirror and non-mirror transfer tests is small to moderate, if it exists.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (PA 774/13-1; 13-2; SPP 1772).