The role of motor memory in action selection and procedural learning: insights from children with typical and atypical development

Abstract

Motor memory is the process by which humans can adopt both persistent and flexible motor behaviours. Persistence and flexibility can be assessed through the examination of the cooperation/competition between new and old motor routines in the motor memory repertoire. Two paradigms seem to be particularly relevant to examine this competition/cooperation. First, a manual search task for hidden objects, namely the C-not-B task, which allows examining how a motor routine may influence the selection of action in toddlers. The second paradigm is procedural learning, and more precisely the consolidation stage, which allows assessing how a previously learnt motor routine becomes resistant to subsequent programming or learning of a new – competitive – motor routine. The present article defends the idea that results of both paradigms give precious information to understand the evolution of motor routines in healthy children. Moreover, these findings echo some clinical observations in developmental neuropsychology, particularly in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder. Such studies suggest that the level of equilibrium between persistence and flexibility of motor routines is an index of the maturity of the motor system.

• motor control
• motor routine
• C-not-B task
• developmental coordination disorder

Notes

¹Wilson and Lejeune used unimanual SRTT tasks in which children had to tap with the four fingers of their dominant hand, while Gheysen required to tap with the index and middle fingers of both hands. Previous studies suggested that children with DCD present difficulties in improving performance on complex motor tasks (Marchiori, Wall, & Bedingfield, 1987) whereas they present similar improvements than TD children on simpler tasks (Revie & Larkin, 1993). The bimanual version of the SRTT task required in the study of Gheysen et al. (2011) could be considered as more difficult than the unimanual version used by Wilson and Lejeune because it involves interhemispheric transfer of information, which is known to be impaired in DCD children (DeGuise & Lassonde, 2001; Sigmundson, Ingvalsen, & Whiting, 1997; Sigmunddon & Whiting, 2002; Tallet, Albaret, & Barral, 2013).