'What' Interfering with 'How'

I went for a cognitive reading group on Thursday. We discussed an interesting article about how declarative learning/ memory (of fact or events) can interfere with the consolidation of procedural memory (of skills, know-how).

The authors (Brown and Robertson, 2007) ask participants to do an experiment in which a solid visual cue could appear in any of 4 positions. Particpants were to press a corresponding button for the position the cue appears, as quickly as possible. A sequence was embedded in a great number of trials and if participants could 'detect' the sequence, their reaction times would improve. Procedural learning was assessed by increase or decrease in reaction times, while declarative learning in the task would involve the person recalling what the sequence was. Interestingly, when participants were presented with a word list immediately after the experiment and asked to learn it, reaction times improved (procedural learning) 12 hours later. This was as opposed to when participants were asked to count the number of vowels in a nonsense word list. The learnign the word list was supposed to interfere with declarative memory of the task; the vowel counting task was a similarly demanding activity that is not suppose to interfere with declarative memory of the task.

The authors suggested that this indicates competition between our declarative memory system and procedural memory system during consolidation. In the experiment, disruption of declarative learning improved procedural learning. Perhaps this released any inhibition effect declarative memory had on procedural learning... and that could explain why skill learning often improves after a period of sleep than wake... where in sleep the declarative memory system is suppressed (i.e. you being unconscious). To top it off, participants who did the word list were poorer on sequence recall (declarative learning) than participants who did the vowel counting.

Pretty exciting results, but with possible confounding factors like arousal and people being more motivated to learn when asked to remember word lists, compared with a 'no-brainer' task like counting vowels.

Still, it makes us think about how we can optimize our learning of new skills? :p haha maybe after my driving lesson, I should be trying to memorize the conversion values of pounds to kg, or cups to millilitres (haha for baking) or stuff like that... maybe that will improve my driving next week... especially if I'm suffering from lack of sleep. :p