The Effect of Attentional Direction on Sub-Stages of Preparing for Motor Skill Execution Across Practice

While several empirical studies using dual-task methodology have examined the effect of attentional direction on motor skill execution; few have studied the effect of attentional direction on just the preparation phase of motor practice. In this study, via a keying sequence paradigm, we explored processing stages of preparation for a motor skill and disentangled the effect of attentional direction on various stages across practice. First, participants learned two keying sequences (three versus six keys). Then, they practiced the keying sequences in response to corresponding sequence labels under two block-wise alternating dual-task conditions. To dissect the preparation phase into sequence selection and sequence initiation stages, participants received varying amounts of preparation time (0, 300, 900 ms) before a starting signal instructed them to begin sequence execution. In each trial, a tone was paired with one of the three or six keypresses, and participants indicated either the keypress with which the tone was presented (skill-focused dual task) or the tone’s pitch (extraneous dual task) after the sequence execution. We found that attentional direction affected only the sequence selection stage, not the sequence initiation stage. During early practice, compared to drawing attention away from execution, directing attention toward execution led to faster sequence selection. This advantage decreased with practice and vanished during late blocks of trials. Moreover, for the execution phase, relative to directing attention toward execution, drawing attention away from execution led to better performance of keying sequence execution across practice. Thus, attentional direction alone does not fully explain the difference between performance patterns at different skill levels in the dual-task literature; rather, types of motor skills and dual task difficulty levels may also drive performance differences.