Motor Skills Enhance Procedural Memory Formation and Protect against Age-Related Decline.

ABSTRACT: The ability to consolidate procedural memories declines with increasing age. Prior knowledge enhances learning and memory consolidation of novel but related information in various domains. Here, we present evidence that prior motor experience-in our case piano skills-increases procedural learning and has a protective effect against age-related decline for the consolidation of novel but related manual movements. In our main experiment, we tested 128 participants with a sequential finger-tapping motor task during two sessions 24 hours apart. We observed enhanced online learning speed and offline memory consolidation for piano players. Enhanced memory consolidation was driven by a strong effect in older participants, whereas younger participants did not benefit significantly from prior piano

SUBMITTER: Muller NC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4917083 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature