Cerebral activation related to skills practice in a double serial reaction time task: striatal involvement in random-order sequence learning

FHCE van der Graaf, BM de Jong*, RP Maguire, LC Meiners, KL Leenders

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

    45 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine the distribution of cerebral activation related to prolonged skill practice. In a bimanual variant of the Serial Reaction Time Task (SRT), simultaneous finger movements of the two hands were made in response to randomly ordered pairs of visual stimuli (Double SRT, DoSRT). Extended practice by a week of daily performance resulted in gradual decrease of reaction times, associated with an increased involvement of the ventral putamen and globus pallidus, reaching statistical significance only on the left, side (Statistical Parametric Mapping, SPM99). This increase was complementary to a decrease of cortical activations. The striatal activation after training on random order stimuli indicates that the striatum is not exclusively involved in sequence learning. This extended function implies a role in the acquisition of basic visuomotor skills that includes the specific selection of the appropriate muscles in response to independent stimuli. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)120-131
    Number of pages12
    JournalCognitive Brain Research
    Volume20
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jul-2004

    Keywords

    • fMRI
    • basal ganglia
    • SRT
    • visuomotor skill learning
    • POSITRON-EMISSION-TOMOGRAPHY
    • POSTERIOR PARIETAL CORTEX
    • BASAL GANGLIA
    • FUNCTIONAL MRI
    • PET
    • IMPLICIT
    • ATTENTION
    • REPRESENTATIONS
    • PERFORMANCE
    • ACQUISITION

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