The effect of haptic cues on motor and perceptual based implicit sequence learning

We introduced haptic cues to the serial reaction time (SRT) sequence learning task alongside the standard visual cues to assess the relative contributions of visual and haptic stimuli to the formation of motor and perceptual memories. We used motorized keys to deliver brief pulse-like displacements to the resting fingers, expecting that the proximity and similarity of these cues to the subsequent response motor actions (finger-activated key-presses) would strengthen the motor memory trace in particular. We adopted the experimental protocol developed by Willingham (1999) to explore whether haptic cues contribute differently than visual cues to the balance of motor and perceptual learning. We found that sequence learning occurs with haptic stimuli as well as with visual stimuli and we found that irrespective of the stimuli (visual or haptic) the SRT task leads to a greater amount of motor learning than perceptual learning.