ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cognit.
Sec. Learning and Cognitive Development
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcogn.2025.1493709
Brain activity during acquisition of long visuospatial sequences
Provisionally accepted
- LMU Munich University Hospital, Munich, Germany
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Explicitly acquiring a visuospatial sequence involves various fundamental attentional and processing mechanisms that can be difficult to disentangle. To this end, we performed an fMRI study (n=34) on the acquisition of visuospatial targets in a delayed imitation paradigm.Task phases alternated between presentation and recall of a 20-target-long sequence.Behavioral data from the recall phase was used to determine encoding progress as a function of time during presentation, with this progress taken as a continuous predictor of BOLD activity. A separate, attention-only task was devised in order to isolate activity related to spatial attention shifts specifically. General linear model analysis using the constructed learning and attention predictors revealed heightened activation for both tasks in bilateral superior parietal lobules (SPL), bilateral V5, and bilateral middle frontal gyri (MFG). Increased response during learning was seen in the SPL and V5, but not MFG. Repeated measures ANOVA indicated significant interactions between region and task, as well as a right-biased tendency in the hemisphere*task interaction. This suggests a role for the SPL and V5 during sequence acquisition that cannot be explained by attention alone.
Keywords: explicit memory, fMRI, sequence learning, visuospatial processing, spatial attention, superior parietal lobule, V5, middle frontal gyrus
Received: 09 Sep 2024; Accepted: 24 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mihovilovic, Stephan, Straube, Dieterich and Eggert. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Milena Inez Mihovilovic, LMU Munich University Hospital, Munich, Germany
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