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.
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, Citation2017; Lakens et al., Citation2018). 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., Citation2007). 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 ΔL = -.50 and ΔU = .50. The resulting effect size is significantly higher than the lower bound ΔL, t(25) = 1.79, p = .043 and significantly lower than the higher bound ΔU, 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.