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Abstract
Procedural skills such as riding a bicycle and playing a musical instrument play a central role in daily life. Such skills are learned gradually and are retained throughout life. The present study investigated 1-year retention of procedural skill in a version of the widely used serial reaction time task (SRTT) in young and older motor-skill experts and older controls in two experiments. The young experts were college-age piano and action video-game players, and the older experts were piano players. Previous studies have reported sequence-specific skill retention in the SRTT as long as 2 weeks but not at 1 year. Results indicated that both young and older experts and older non-experts revealed sequence-specific skill retention after 1 year with some evidence that general motor skill was retained as well. These findings are consistent with theoretical accounts of procedural skill learning such as the procedural reinstatement theory as well as with previous studies of retention of other motor skills.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by grant R37AG15450 from the National Institute on Ageing. We thank Eileen Kranz, Lindsey Kramer, Matthew Conetta, Andrew Kelly, Danielle Overpeck, and Noel Burns for help with data collection. We thank Hadley Bergstrom, Betty Murphy, and Deborah Clawson for helpful comments. A preliminary report of these findings was presented at the May 2006 Association for Psychological Sciences Annual Convention. We thank Rolando Rodriguez and Chandra Erdman for assistance with statistical analyses.
Notes
1We replicated all t-tests with non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, and the results were the same as those reported in the manuscript.