Is there more room to improve? The lifespan trajectory of procedural learning and its relationship to the between- and within-group differences in average response times

Abstract

Characterizing the developmental trajectories of cognitive functions such as learning, memory and decision making across the lifespan faces fundamental challenges. Cognitive functions typically encompass several processes that can be differentially affected by age.Methodological issues also arise when comparisons are made across age groups that differ in basic performance measures, such as in average response times (RTs). Here we focus on procedural learning -a fundamental cognitive function that underlies the acquisition of cognitive, social, and motor skills -and demonstrate how disentangling subprocesses of learning and controlling for differences in average RTs can reveal different developmental trajectories across the human lifespan. Two hundred-seventy participants aged between 7 and 85 years performed a probabilistic sequence learning task that enabled us to separately measure two processes of procedural learning, namely general skill learning and statistical learning. Using raw RT measures, in between-group comparisons, we found a U-shaped trajectory with children and older adults exhibiting greater general skill learning compared to adolescents and younger adults. However, when we controlled for differences in average RTs (either by using ratio scores or focusing on a subsample of participants with similar average speed), only children (but not older adults) demonstrated superior general skill learning consistently across analyses. Testing the relationship between average RTs and general skill learning within age groups shed light on further age-related differences, suggesting that general skill learning measures are more affected by average speed in some age groups.Consistent with previous studies of learning probabilistic regularities, statistical learning showed a gradual decline across the lifespan, and learning performance seemed to be independent of average speed, regardless of the age group. Overall, our results suggest that children are superior learners in various aspects of procedural learning, including both general skill and statistical learning. Our study also highlights the importance to test, and control for, the effect of average speed on other RT measures of cognitive functions, which can fundamentally affect the interpretation of group differences in developmental, aging and clinical psychology and neuroscience studies.

When less is more: Enhanced statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies after disruption of bilateral DLPFC

“…Using hypnosis, Nemeth, Janacsek, Polner, et al (2013) experimentally reduced frontal-lobe connectivity, reducing competition from the attention-based frontal lobe processes, and found increased statistical learning performance compared to an alert, awake state. Additionally, several developmental studies have found that children perform better than adults on statistical learning tasks (Janacsek et al, 2012;Juhasz et al, 2019;Zwart, Vissers, Kessels, & Maes, 2019). Supporting the competition model, the degree of learning drops with the onset of adolescence, coinciding with the maturation of the frontal lobe.…”

“…We chose a widely used task for measuring probabilistic statistical learning, namely the alternating serial reaction time task (ASRT, Figure 1A), which has been used in experimental psychology studies (J. H. Howard & Howard, 1997;D. V. Howard et al, 2004;Nemeth et al, 2010;Song, Howard, & Howard, 2007), developmental studies (Janacsek et al, 2012;Juhasz, Nemeth, & Janacsek, 2019;Nemeth, Janacsek, & Fiser, 2013), as well as neuroimaging studies (Bennett et al, 2011;Stillman et al, 2013). The ASRT task is a four-choice reaction time task in which predetermined stimuli alternate with random ones creating a probabilistic structure with more frequent versus less frequent stimulus triplets.…”

Retrieval of a well-established skill is resistant to distraction: evidence from an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task

“…The dissection of the perceptuo-motor adaptation and the statistical aspect of the learning process was also supported by the fact that after the normalization of the baseline RTs, the lack of differences in statistical learning between the single-and the dual-task group remained. As the development of general skill and statistical learning might follow different trajectories (Juhasz, Nemeth, & Janacsek, 2019), this result is crucial for stating that the sequence knowledge is the same between groups. Previous inconsistencies in the literature might also originate from differences in the proportion of general skill-and statistical learning-related factors of the used task.…”

Competitive Neurocognitive Functions Can Tell Us What to Learn and When: In Schools and Beyond

“…A growing body of research has shown that children (under the age of ~12-13 years) outperform adolescents and adults on learning/memory tasks that require the extraction of predictable patterns from the stimulus stream, which is an important aspect of procedural memory and skill learning (Janacsek et al, 2012;Juhasz, Nemeth, & Janacsek, 2019;Nemeth, Janacsek, & Fiser, 2013;Thompson-Schill, Ramscar, & Chrysikou, 2009). It has been proposed that this behavioral pattern can be explained by a relatively greater reliance on one neural 6 circuitry involved in learning compared to the other due to their different pace of maturation.…”