Reshaping the Motor Engram - An Online Crowdsourcing Study.

A critical point in learning and memory research is whether memories, once consolidated, remain unchanged or whether they continue to undergo plastic changes and remodeling. While previous research has focused on experimental destabilization during early stages of the memory life cycle, i.e., during encoding or early consolidation, experimental data that provides information about the effect of destabilization interventions on well-consolidated memories is still missing. This is particularly true for the procedural memory domain, such as learning a sensorimotor skill. This project is designed to characterize the effect of a single behavioral interference intervention on a previously consolidated sensorimotor skill in a large sample of healthy volunteers recruited through an online crowdsourcing platform. In a longitudinal design, participants will perform an implicit sequence learning task over five consecutive sessions, followed by an interference intervention in session six and a follow-up evaluation of the stability of the learned skill in session seven. The experimental design includes two levels of sequential information (spatial and temporal), which allows the testing of the specificity of the interference intervention. Behavioral performance throughout the experimental sessions is acquired via the manual input on the participants' computer keyboards and used to extract the learning rate and the interference effect (primary outcome).