AUTHOR=Boutin Arnaud , Massen Cristina , Heuer Herbert TITLE=Modality-specific organization in the representation of sensorimotor sequences JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=4 YEAR=2013 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00937 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00937 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

Sensorimotor representations of movement sequences are hierarchically organized. Here we test the effects of different stimulus modalities on such organizations. In the visual group, participants responded to a repeated sequence of visually presented stimuli by depressing spatially compatible keys on a response pad. In the auditory group, learners were required to respond to auditorily presented stimuli, which had no direct spatial correspondence with the response keys: the lowest pitch corresponded to the leftmost key and the highest pitch to the rightmost key. We demonstrate that hierarchically and auto-organized sensorimotor representations are developed through practice, which are specific both to individuals and stimulus modalities. These findings highlight the dynamic and sensory-specific modulation of chunk processing during sensorimotor learning – sensorimotor chunking – and provide evidence that modality-specific mechanisms underlie the hierarchical organization of sequence representations.