title: Modality-specific organization in the representation of sensorimotor sequences.
abstract: Sensorimotor representations of movement sequences are hierarchically organized. Here we test the effects of different stimulus modalities on such organizations. In the visual group, participants responded to a repeated sequence of visually presented stimuli by depressing spatially compatible keys on a response pad. In the auditory group, learners were required to respond to auditorily presented stimuli, which had no direct spatial correspondence with the response keys: the lowest pitch corresponded to the leftmost key and the highest pitch to the rightmost key. We demonstrate that hierarchically and auto-organized sensorimotor representations are developed through practice, which are specific both to individuals and stimulus modalities. These findings highlight the dynamic and sensory-specific modulation of chunk processing during sensorimotor learning - sensorimotor chunking - and provide evidence that modality-specific mechanisms underlie the hierarchical organization of sequence representations.
authors.affiliation: IfADo - Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors Dortmund, Germany.
authors.forename: Arnaud
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Boutin
authors.affiliation: IfADo - Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors Dortmund, Germany.
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Massen
authors.affiliation: IfADo - Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors Dortmund, Germany.
authors.forename: Herbert
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Heuer
keywords: chunking; implicit/explicit processing; sensorimotor representation; sequence learning; stimulus modality