Comparison of Motor Skill Acquisition according to Types of Sensory-Stimuli Cue in Serial Reaction Time Task

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate whether types of sensory-stimuli cues in terms of visual, auditory, and visuoauditory cues can be affected to motor sequential learning in healthy adults, using serial reaction time task. Methods: Twenty four healthy subjects participated in this study, who were randomly allocated into three groups, in terms of visual-stimuli (VS) group, auditory-stimuli (AS) group, and visuoauditory-stimuli (VAS) group. In SRT task, eight Arabic numbers were adopted as presentational stimulus, which were composed of three different types of presentational modules, in terms of visual, auditory, and visuoauditory stimuli. On an experiment, all subjects performed total 3 sessions relevant to each stimulus module with a pause of 10 minutes for training and pre-/post-tests. At the pre- and post-tests, reaction time and accuracy were calculated. Results: In reaction time, significant differences were founded in terms of between-subjects, within-subjects, and interaction effect for group ${\times}$ repeated factor. In accuracy, no significant differences were observed in between-group and interaction effect for groups ${\times}$ repeated factor. However, a significant main effect of within-subjects was observed. In addition, a significant difference was showed in comparison of differences of changes between the pre- and post-test only in the reaction time among three groups. Conclusion: This study suggest that short-term sequential motor training on one day induced behavioral modification, such as speed and accuracy of motor response. In addition, we found that motor training using visual-stimuli cue showed better effect of motor skill acquisition, compared to auditory and visuoauditory-stimuli cues.