NDLI: Motor Skills Enhance Procedural Memory Formation and Protect against Age-Related Decline.

Content Provider	Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Author	Nils C. J. Müller Lisa Genzel Boris N. Konrad Marcel Pawlowski David Neville Guillén Fernández Axel Steiger Martin Dresler
Abstract	The ability to consolidate procedural memories declines with increasing age. Prior knowledge enhances learning and memory consolidation of novel but related information in various domains. Here, we present evidence that prior motor experience-in our case piano skills-increases procedural learning and has a protective effect against age-related decline for the consolidation of novel but related manual movements. In our main experiment, we tested 128 participants with a sequential finger-tapping motor task during two sessions 24 hours apart. We observed enhanced online learning speed and offline memory consolidation for piano players. Enhanced memory consolidation was driven by a strong effect in older participants, whereas younger participants did not benefit significantly from prior piano experience. In a follow up independent control experiment, this compensatory effect of piano experience was not visible after a brief offline period of 30 minutes, hence requiring an extended consolidation window potentially involving sleep. Through a further control experiment, we rejected the possibility that the decreased effect in younger participants was caused by training saturation. We discuss our results in the context of the neurobiological schema approach and suggest that prior experience has the potential to rescue memory consolidation from age-related cognitive decline.
e-ISSN	19326203
DOI	10.1371/journal.pone.0157770
Journal	PLoS ONE
Issue Number	6
Volume Number	11
Language	English
Publisher	Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Publisher Date	2016-01-01
Publisher Place	United States
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Medicine Science
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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