Sensory information in perceptual-motor sequence learning: visual and/or tactile stimuli

Abrahamse, Elger; van der Lubbe, Rob; Verwey, Willem B. · 2009 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1007/s00221-009-1903-5

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Summary

This study investigates whether combining visual and tactile sensory inputs enhances perceptual-motor sequence learning, addressing the gap in research regarding multimodal stimuli in serial reaction time (SRT) tasks. While previous studies focused on unimodal presentation or congruent visual cues, this research examines if congruent, temporally synchronized visual and tactile stimuli improve sequence acquisition compared to single-modality conditions. The authors hypothesized that enriched perceptual events from bimodal stimuli might strengthen sequential representations, given that real-world motor performance often involves multiple sensory sources. The experiment involved 66 participants divided into three training groups: visual only, tactile only, and bimodal (visual and tactile combined). Participants performed an SRT task requiring button presses corresponding to stimulus locations. Visual stimuli were presented on a screen, while tactile stimuli were delivered via vibro-tactile devices attached to the fingers. The training phase consisted of sequence blocks containing a repeated 12-item second-order conditional sequence, interspersed with pseudo-random blocks to measure the sequence effect (the increase in reaction time during random blocks). Following training, all participants underwent a transfer phase testing performance under visual, tactile, and bimodal conditions to assess the generalizability of learned sequences. Explicit awareness was measured using a process dissociation procedure. Results indicated that sequence performance was similar for the visual only and bimodal training groups, both of which outperformed the tactile only group during training. Specifically, the tactile only group exhibited slower reaction times and larger error rates, but the bimodal group did not show any significant benefit from the addition of tactile stimuli compared to the visual only group. In the transfer phase, performance differences between the visual and bimodal groups remained negligible across identical stimulus conditions. Crucially, when comparing the visual and tactile training groups under identical transfer conditions, their sequence effects were similar, suggesting that the poorer performance of the tactile group during training reflected differences in the expression of sequence knowledge rather than a deficit in learning itself. Awareness scores did not differ significantly between groups, indicating comparable levels of explicit and implicit learning. The findings suggest that adding congruent tactile stimuli to visual inputs does not enhance sequence learning in SRT tasks. The authors propose that participants may have strategically focused on visual stimuli due to visual dominance, ignoring the redundant tactile input, or that spatial disparity between stimulus locations hindered effective integration. The study concludes that while tactile stimuli alone support sequence learning, they do not augment visual-based learning when presented simultaneously. This highlights the importance of distinguishing between the acquisition of sequence knowledge and its expression, as modality-specific constraints can affect performance metrics without altering the underlying learning process.

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• haptic feedback