| dc.description.abstract | Motor sequence learning helps humans acquire new skills which require information about variation in spatial, temporal, or both domains. By repeating and practicing a series of actions, such as in dancing, martial arts, typing, and playing musical instruments, people can learn sequences of movements implicitly or explicitly and perform them more smoothly. The most commonly adopted paradigm in studying the acquisition process of sequence order is the Serial Reaction Time Task (SRTT). In the literature, SRTT has been mostly examined with the variation of spatial structures embedded in a sequence, but few sequence learning studies have systematically explored the impacts of varying temporal and spatial structures. The purpose of this study is to explore the respective contributions of spatial and temporal sequences and their interaction in SRTT. In the spatial domain, I controlled the length and complexity of sequences to different levels in Experiment 1. The learning effect, indexed by the difference between the Random and Regular reaction times (RTs), showed that the complexity of the sequences dominated the learning effect. In the temporal domain, I compared the learning of high and low complexity temporal sequences in Experiment 2, and the results indicated that the complexity of the sequence also affects learning of temporal sequences. In Experiment 3, I combined temporal and spatial sequence learning tested the simultaneous_ learning of both domains. Moreover, I compared the effect of applying transcranial direct current stimulation over the contralateral primary motor cortex with the sham group on learning. The outcomes showed that tDCS weakened the combined and spatial sequence learning. In Experiment 4, I modified the posttest for temporal and spatial sequence learning by maintaining the sequence information of one domain and removing the sequence information of the other domain. The results showed that both temporal, and spatial sequences can be learned simultaneously and there was a significant correlation between spatial and temporal learning indices, indicating that temporal sequence learning is linked to spatial information. Overall, this study suggests that temporal and spatial information are integrated in sequence learning, rather than being two parallel domains of learning. | en_US |