Information acquired during waking can be reactivated during sleep, promoting memory stabilization. After people learned to produce two melodies in time with moving visual symbols, we produced a relative improvement in performance by presenting one melody during an afternoon nap. Electrophysiological signs of memory processing during sleep corroborated the notion that appropriate auditory stimulation that does not disrupt sleep can nevertheless bias memory consolidation in relevant brain circuitry.

Learning of complex motor skills requires learning of component movements as well as the sequential structure of their order and timing. Using a Serial Interception Sequence Learning (SISL) task, participants learned a sequence of precisely timed interception responses through training with a repeating sequence. Following initial implicit learning of the repeating sequence, functional MRI data were collected during performance of that known sequence and compared with activity evoked during novel sequences of actions, novel timing patterns, or both. Reduced activity was observed during the practiced sequence in a distributed bilateral network including extrastriate occipital, parietal, and premotor cortical regions. These reductions in evoked activity likely reflect improved efficiency in visuospatial processing, spatio-motor integration, motor planning, and motor execution for the trained sequence, which is likely supported by nondeclarative skill learning. In addition, the practiced sequence evoked increased activity in the left ventral striatum and medial prefrontal cortex, while the posterior cingulate was more active during periods of better performance. Many prior studies of perceptual-motor skill learning have found increased activity in motor areas of frontal cortex (e.g., motor and premotor cortex, SMA) and striatal areas (e.g., the putamen). The change in activity observed here (i.e., decreased activity across a cortical network) may reflect skill learning that is predominantly expressed through more accurate performance rather than decreased reaction time.

Memory-impaired patients express intact implicit perceptual–motor sequence learning, but it has been difficult to obtain a similarly clear dissociation in healthy participants. When explicit memory is intact, participants acquire some explicit knowledge and performance improvements from implicit learning may be subtle. Therefore, it is difficult to determine whether performance exceeds what could be expected on the basis of the concomitant explicit knowledge. Using a challenging new sequence-learning task, robust implicit learning was found in healthy participants with virtually no associated explicit knowledge. Participants trained on a repeating sequence that was selected randomly from a set of five. On a performance test of all five sequences, performance was best on the trained sequence, and two-thirds of the participants exhibited individually reliable improvement (by chi-square analysis). Participants could not reliably indicate which sequence had been trained by either recognition or recall. Only by expressing their knowledge via performance were participants able to indicate which sequence they had learned.

The expression of expert motor skills typically involves learning to perform a precisely timed sequence of movements (e.g., language production, music performance, athletic skills). Research examining incidental sequence learning has previously relied on a perceptually-cued task that gives participants exposure to repeating motor sequences but does not require timing of responses for accuracy. Using a novel perceptual-motor sequence learning task, learning a precisely timed cued sequence of motor actions is shown to occur without explicit instruction. Participants learned a repeating sequence through practice and showed sequence-specific knowledge via a performance decrement when switched to an unfamiliar sequence. In a second experiment, the integration of representation of action order and timing sequence knowledge was examined. When either action order or timing sequence information was selectively disrupted, performance was reduced to levels similar to completely novel sequences. Unlike prior sequence-learning research that has found timing information to be secondary to learning action sequences, when the task demands require accurate action and timing information, an integrated representation of these types of information is acquired. These results provide the first evidence for incidental learning of fully integrated action and timing sequence information in the absence of an independent representation of action order, and suggest that this integrative mechanism may play a material role in the acquisition of complex motor skills.

Objective Implicit skill learning is hypothesized to depend on nondeclarative memory that operates independent of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) memory system and instead depends on cortico-striatal circuits between the basal ganglia and cortical areas supporting motor function and planning. Research with the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task suggests that patients with memory-disorders due to MTL damage exhibit normal implicit sequence learning. However, reports of intact learning rely on observations of no group differences, leading to speculation whether implicit sequence learning is fully intact in these patients. Patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD) often exhibit impaired sequence learning, but this impairment is not universally observed. Method Implicit perceptual-motor sequence learning was examined using the Serial Interception Sequence Learning (SISL) task in patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI; n=11) and patients with PD (n=15). Sequence learning in SISL is resistant to explicit learning and individually adapted task difficulty controls for baseline performance differences. Results Patients with MCI exhibited robust sequence learning, equivalent to healthy older adults (n=20), supporting the hypothesis that the MTL does not contribute to learning in this task. In contrast, the majority of patients with PD exhibited no sequence-specific learning in spite of matched overall task performance. Two patients with PD exhibited performance indicative of an explicit compensatory strategy suggesting that impaired implicit learning may lead to greater reliance on explicit memory in some individuals. Conclusion The differences in learning between patient groups provides strong evidence in favor of implicit sequence learning depending solely on intact basal ganglia function with no contribution from the MTL memory system.