Procedural motor skills are crucial for activities of daily living. Recent work demonstrated that virtually all performance improvements during early learning of a moderately difficult sequential skill, including a form of generalization, develop during rest intervals interspersed with practice (micro-offline learning), a form of rapid consolidation of skill[1, 2].Implementation of a crowdsourcing strategy showed this result to be highly reproducible in large number of subjects performing the task in their own environment, outside the lab[2, 3]. Further work demonstrated that the mechanisms by which the brain binds discrete brain representations into consolidated, temporally resolved procedural skill sequences during waking rest involve wakeful neural replay. Neural replay is the temporally compressed reactivation of neural activity patterns representing behavioral sequences during rest[4]. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) activity during acquisition and rapid consolidation of a procedural sequential motor skill showed (a) the presence of waking neural replay during the same rest periods in which rapid consolidation occurs, (b) that wakeful neural replay is temporally compressed by approximately 20-fold relative to the acquired skill, (c) that increase in replay rates during rest periods is selective for the trained sequence and predicts the magnitude of skill consolidation, and (d) that the neural representation of replay events engage not only the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex but also the contralateral sensorimotor cortex. Overall, these results document the presence of hippocampo-neocortical replay that supports rapid wakeful consolidation of skill[5].

References

1. Bonstrup, M., et al., A Rapid Form of Offline Consolidation in SkillLearning. Curr Biol, 2019. 29(8): p. 1346-1351 e4.

2. Johnson, B.P., et al., Generalization of procedural motor sequencelearning after a single practice trial. NPJ Sci Learn, 2023. 8(1):p. 45.

3. Bonstrup, M., et al., Mechanisms of offline motor learning at amicroscale of seconds in large-scale crowdsourced data. NPJ Sci Learn,2020. 5: p. 7.

4. Genzel, L., et al., A consensus statement: defining terms forreactivation analysis. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 2020. 375(1799):p. 20200001.

5. Buch, E.R., et al., Consolidation of human skill linked to wakinghippocampo-neocortical replay.Cell Rep, 2021. 35(10): p.109193.

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