Sounds and Sights in Sequence Learning: Can Accessory Auditory Cues Enhance Motor Task Performance?

Motor sequence learning, or the ability to learn and remember sequences of actions, such as the sequence of actions required to tie one’s shoelaces, is ubiquitous to everyday life. Contemporary research on motor sequence learning has been largely unimodal, ignoring the possibility that our nervous system might benefit from sensory inputs from multiple modalities. In this study, we investigated the properties of motor sequence learning in response to auditory-visual stimuli. We found that sequence learning with auditory-visual stimuli showed a hallmark feature of traditional unimodal sequence learning tasks: sensitivity to stimulus timing, where lengthier interstimulus intervals of 500 ms improved sequence learning compared to briefer interstimulus intervals of 200 ms. Consistent with previous findings, we also found that auditory-visual stimuli improved learning compared to a unimodal visual-only condition. Furthermore, the informativeness of the auditory stimuli was important, as auditory stimuli which predicted the location of visual cues improved sequence learning compared to uninformative auditory stimuli which did not predict the location of the visual cues. Our findings suggest a potential utility of leveraging audio-visual stimuli in sequence learning interventions to enhance skill acquisition in education and rehabilitation contexts.