de Vries, M. , Reed, H. , Gemmink, M. & Jolles, J.
VU University Amsterdam
Many daily routines, such as reading, walking, and riding a bike, are performed effortlessly and without paying much attention to it, in other words, these skills have become automatic. Some children have difficulties arriving at the level of automaticity when learning new skills at school, resulting in, for instance, problems in reading and arithmetic fluency. This may be caused by a rather domain-general deficit in the procedural memory system (e.g., Nicolson & Fawcett, 2010), involved in the acquisition of cognitive and motor skills and mediated by frontal-striatal-cerebellar regions (Packard & Knowlton, 2002; Ullman, 2004). A typical test of automatized sequence learning is the so-called serial reaction time task (SRTT; Nissen & Bullemer, 1987). In our study, 28 Dutch children in Grade 2 and 3 participated in an adapted version of SRTT. We hypothesized that children with low scores on reading and arithmetic fluency would show a significantly smaller effect of automatized sequence learning. The results showed that reading fluency did not affect serial reaction time performance. However, as expected, children with low scores on the arithmetic fluency test performed significantly worse on the serial reaction time task. The implications of the results are discussed.