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1. Not All Procedural Learning Tasks Are Difficult for Adults With Developmental Language Disorder

   https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-20-00548  

   Gerken, LouAnn; Plante, Elena; Goffman, Lisa (March 2021, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research)

   null (Ed.)

   Purpose The experiment reported here compared two hypotheses for the poor statistical and artificial grammar learning often seen in children and adults with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as specific language impairment). The procedural learning deficit hypothesis states that implicit learning of rule-based input is impaired, whereas the sequential pattern learning deficit hypothesis states that poor performance is only seen when learners must implicitly compute sequential dependencies. The current experiment tested learning of an artificial grammar that could be learned via feature activation, as observed in an associatively organized lexicon, without computing sequential dependencies and should therefore be learnable on the sequential pattern learning deficit hypothesis, but not on the procedural learning deficit hypothesis. Method Adults with DLD and adults with typical language development (TD) listened to consonant–vowel–consonant–vowel familiarization words from one of two artificial phonological grammars: Family Resemblance (two out of three features) and a control (exclusive OR, in which both consonants are voiced OR both consonants are voiceless) grammar in which no learning was predicted for either group. At test, all participants rated 32 test words as to whether or not they conformed to the pattern in the familiarization words. Results Adults with DLD and adults with TD showed equal and robust learning of the Family Resemblance grammar, accepting significantly more conforming than nonconforming test items. Both groups who were familiarized with the Family Resemblance grammar also outperformed those who were familiarized with the OR grammar, which, as predicted, was learned by neither group. Conclusion Although adults and children with DLD often underperform, compared to their peers with TD, on statistical and artificial grammar learning tasks, poor performance appears to be tied to the implicit computation of sequential dependencies, as predicted by the sequential pattern learning deficit hypothesis. 

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2. Age-related enhancement in visuomotor learning by a dual-task

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-09553-7  

   Wang, Tony S. L.; Martinez, Miles; Festa, Elena K.; Heindel, William C.; Song, Joo-Hyun (April 2022, Scientific Reports)

   Abstract Many daily activities require performance of multiple tasks integrating cognitive and motor processes. While the fact that both processes go through deterioration and changes with aging has been generally accepted, not much is known about how aging interacts with stages of motor skill acquisition under a cognitively demanding situation. To address this question, we combined a visuomotor adaptation task with a secondary cognitive task. We made two primary findings beyond the expected age-related performance deterioration. First, while young adults showed classical dual-task cost in the early motor learning phase dominated by explicit processes, older adults instead strikingly displayed enhanced performance in the later stage, dominated by implicit processes. For older adults, the secondary task may have facilitated a shift to their relatively intact implicit learning processes that reduced reliance on their already-deficient explicit processes during visuomotor adaptation. Second, we demonstrated that consistently performing the secondary task in learning and re-learning phases can operate as an internal task-context and facilitate visuomotor memory retrieval later regardless of age groups. Therefore, our study demonstrated age-related similarities and differences in integrating concurrent cognitive load with motor skill acquisition which, may in turn, contributes to the understanding of a shift in balance across multiple systems. 

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3. Taking aim at the perceptual side of motor learning: exploring how explicit and implicit learning encode perceptual error information through depth vision

   https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00153.2021  

   Campagnoli, Carlo; Domini, Fulvio; Taylor, Jordan A. (August 2021, Journal of Neurophysiology)

   Motor learning in visuomotor adaptation tasks results from both explicit and implicit processes, each responding differently to an error signal. Although the motor output side of these processes has been extensively studied, the visual input side is relatively unknown. We investigated if and how depth perception affects the computation of error information by explicit and implicit motor learning. Two groups of participants made reaching movements to bring a virtual cursor to a target in the frontoparallel plane. The Delayed group was allowed to reaim and their feedback was delayed to emphasize explicit learning, whereas the camped group received task-irrelevant clamped cursor feedback and continued to aim straight at the target to emphasize implicit adaptation. Both groups played this game in a highly detailed virtual environment (depth condition), leveraging a cover task of playing darts in a virtual tavern, and in an empty environment (no-depth condition). The delayed group showed an increase in error sensitivity under depth relative to no-depth. In contrast, the clamped group adapted to the same degree under both conditions. The movement kinematics of the delayed participants also changed under the depth condition, consistent with the target appearing more distant, unlike the Clamped group. A comparison of the delayed behavioral data with a perceptual task from the same individuals showed that the greater reaiming in the depth condition was consistent with an increase in the scaling of the error distance and size. These findings suggest that explicit and implicit learning processes may rely on different sources of perceptual information. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We leveraged a classic sensorimotor adaptation task to perform a first systematic assessment of the role of perceptual cues in the estimation of an error signal in the 3-D space during motor learning. We crossed two conditions presenting different amounts of depth information, with two manipulations emphasizing explicit and implicit learning processes. Explicit learning responded to the visual conditions, consistent with perceptual reports, whereas implicit learning appeared to be independent of them. 

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4. Contextual Interference Effect in Motor Skill Learning: An Empirical and Computational Investigation

   Schorn, Julia M. (January 2020, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   null (Ed.)

   To efficiently learn and retain motor skills, we can introduce contextual interference through interleaved practice. Interleaving tasks or stimuli initially hinders performance but leads to superior long-term retention. It is not yet clear if implicitly learned information also benefits from interleaving and how interleaved practice changes the representation of skills. The present study used a serial reaction time task where participants practiced three 8-item sequences that were either interleaved or blocked on Day 1 (training) and Day 2 (testing). An explicit recall test allowed us to post-hoc sort participants into two groups of learners: implicit learners recalled less items than did explicit learners. Significant decreasing monotonic trends, indicating successful learning, were observed in both training groups and both groups of learners. We found support for the benefit of interleaved practice on retention of implicit sequence learning, indicating that the benefit of interleaved practice does not depend on explicit memory retrieval. A Bayesian Sequential Learning model was adopted to model human performance. Both empirical and computational results suggest that explicit knowledge of the sequence was detrimental to retention when the sequences were blocked, but not when they were interleaved, suggesting that contextual interference may be a protective factor of interference of explicit knowledge. Slower learning in the interleaved condition may result in better retention and reduced interference of explicit knowledge on performance. 

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5. Testing the three-stage model of second language skill acquisition

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S027226312500021X  

   Maie, Ryo; Godfroid, Aline (May 2025, Studies in Second Language Acquisition)

   Abstract Skill acquisition theory conceptualizes second language (L2) learning in three stages (declarative, procedural, and automatic), yet competing theoretical models with fewer stages also exist, and the number of stages has never actually been tested. We tested the validity of the three-stage model by investigating the number and nature of learning stages in L2 skill acquisition. Seventy-three participants deliberately learned grammar and vocabulary of a miniature language through explicit-deductive instruction. They systematically practiced comprehending the language until their accuracy and speed of performance did not improve anymore. Participants received a battery of tests assessing individual differences in their declarative and procedural learning abilities. We first applied hidden Markov modeling to participants’ reaction time data (obtained from the language practice) to compare rival hypotheses on the number of stages in L2 skill acquisition. We then examined which cognitive variables predicted participants’ performances (accuracy and speed) in each stage. Our results indicated that participants indeed acquired L2 skills in three stages and that their performance correlated initially with declarative learning ability, but there was a tendency for procedural learning ability to take over in the later stages. Our findings provide the first formal evidence for the influential three-stage model of L2 skill acquisition. 

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