title: Practice induces function-specific changes in brain activity.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Practice can have a profound effect on performance and brain activity, especially if a task can be automated. Tasks that allow for automatization typically involve repeated encoding of information that is paired with a constant response. Much remains unknown about the effects of practice on encoding and response selection in an automated task.
  
  
  METHODS
  To investigate function-specific effects of automatization we employed a variant of a Sternberg task with optimized separation of activity associated with encoding and response selection by means of m-sequences. This optimized randomized event-related design allows for model free measurement of BOLD signals over the course of practice. Brain activity was measured at six consecutive runs of practice and compared to brain activity in a novel task.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Prompt reductions were found in the entire cortical network involved in encoding after a single run of practice. Changes in the network associated with response selection were less robust and were present only after the third run of practice.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This study shows that automatization causes heterogeneous decreases in brain activity across functional regions that do not strictly track performance improvement. This suggests that cognitive performance is supported by a dynamic allocation of multiple resources in a distributed network. Our findings may bear importance in understanding the role of automatization in complex cognitive performance, as increased encoding efficiency in early stages of practice possibly increases the capacity to otherwise interfering information.
authors.affiliation: Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, University Medical Centre Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands. t.vanraalten@umcutrecht.nl
authors.forename: Tamar R
authors.initials: TR
authors.lastname: van Raalten
authors.forename: Nick F
authors.initials: NF
authors.lastname: Ramsey
authors.forename: Jeff
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Duyn
authors.forename: Johan M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Jansma
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis