Coomans, D. , Deroost, N. , Van den Bussche, E. & Soetens, E.
Department of Cognitive Psychology. Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Brussels, Belgium.
We examined whether pure perceptual sequence learning occurred in a serial reaction time task in which eye movements were avoided. Participants had to respond to the identity of a target letter pair (“XO” required a left button press, “OX” a right button press,) appearing in one of four locations between similar distractor letter pairs (“YQ” or “QY”). While target identity, and therefore manual responses, changed randomly, target location followed a fixed sequence. To avoid eye movements as much as possible, (1) the letter pairs appeared around a fixation cross with a small visual angle and (2) stimulus duration was only 100 ms, a period too short to allow eye movements. At the end of the training, a block in which the trained fixed sequence was replaced by a new fixed sequence was inserted to be able to assess learning. The results showed that the perceptual location sequence was learned in this experiment, as participants responded slower in this ‘new sequence’ block than in the surrounding ‘old sequence’ blocks. Consequently, pure perceptual sequence learning does not rely on eye movements and cannot be considered as a sort of motor learning.