Human behaviour consists largely of elemental tasks, which when performed in sequence make up larger actions. In the trajectory serial reaction time (SRT) task, participants move their cursors to...Show moreHuman behaviour consists largely of elemental tasks, which when performed in sequence make up larger actions. In the trajectory serial reaction time (SRT) task, participants move their cursors to one of four stimuli located at corners in a square-shaped grid. This task has been used to study implicit learning of motor skills. Of interest to the present study are results from Kachergis, De Kleijn, et al. (2014) in which subsequences were not learned unilaterally. Preliminary analysis carried out after the fact suggests this effect cannot be fully ascribed to diagonal or infrequent moves making certain subsequences harder. The present study aims to determine whether the effect is due to variations in distance, whether it is correlated with frequency, and whether its orientation frame is absolute or relative. 52 participants divided into two conditions, each of which saw subsequences in a different orientation, performed an online version of the trajectory SRT task. We discuss three main findings. First, no evidence was found to suggest relative distance played a role. Second, moves which occurred frequently were associated with lower RTs. Third, relative RTs per subsequence were the same between the two conditions, indicating the effect is relative to the orientation of moves made during training. Together these results lead us to conclude that higher frequency of certain moves during training leads to better post-training performance of subsequences containing these moves. Post-hoc analyses suggest this relationship might not be entirely straight-forward. In light of these outcomes and their implications, we discuss several opportunities for future research, as well as limitations and alternate interpretations.Show less
