PMID-18951924[0] Consciousness and the consolidation of motor learning
- Not all consolidation occurs during sleep; in some instances consolidation only occurs during the day; in other times, neither daytime or sleep consolidates a memory.
- Attention is an important factor that may determine if sleep or daytime replay plays a role in consolidation.
- In a tapping task, after a night of sleep performance is faster and more accurrate. Without the sleep, but with the same 12-hour interval, the same improvement is absent.
- Evidence suggests though we experience the sensation of 'voluntary' movement, the conscious wish to move is more an afterthought than the cause.
- Source: Libet et al 1983. (Subjects could accurately time events, and reported that the will to move preceded actual movement. However, the cortical potentials associated with movement preceded conscious awareness).
- nonetheless, studies indicate that conscious awareness can affect movements, and how they are consolidated.
- people with no declarative memory (like HR) can still remember procedural skills.
- Consolidation = the process by which a fragile memory acquired via practice or exposure is consolidated into a more permanent, stable long-term form. If it occurs in the hours after practice, then it is 'off-line'; likewise for sleep.
- Consolidation also includes stabilization, or making the memories robust to interference from new memories (retroactive interference).
- This seems to be dependent on sleep, specifically NREM.
- In studies where attention was broken using a tone counting task, neither over-night nor over-day enhancements were found to occur for motor sequence learning.
- Another interesting effect is the development of explicit memory over the course of a night's sleep. Sleep seems to encourage conscious awareness of implicit patterns. -- probably through replay and integration.
- Regarding "thinking too much" about sports: "As in the studies cited above, motor learning may initially rely on more explicit and prefrontal areas, but after extended practice and expertise, shift to more dorsal areas, but thinking about the movement can shift activity back to the less skilled explicit areas. Although many explanations may be derived, one could argue that these athletes show that even when years of practice has given the implicit system an exquisitely fine tuned memory for a movement, the explicit system can interfere at the time of performance and erase all evidence of implicit memory."
- Well-written throughout, especially the conclusion paragraph.
____References____
|