Time course of brain activation during learning of sequential
procedures
- An fMRI study
Katsuyuki Sakai*, Okihide Hikosaka**, and Satoru Miyauchi^^*Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033; **School of Medicine, Juntendo University, Tokyo 113-8431; ^^Communications Research Laboratory, Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, Kobe 651-2401
We studied the neural correlates of visuo-motor sequence-learning, using functional MRI. The two frontal regions, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and presupplementary motor area, were activated during the earlier stages of learning, while the two parietal areas, precuneus and intraparietal sulcus, were activated during the later stages. The results suggest that the acquisition of a visuo-motor sequence depends on frontal activation, while its retrieval requires parietal activation. This might reflect the transition from the declarative stage to the procedural stage in visuo-motor sequence-learning.
