Reshaping the Motor Engram - An Online Crowdsourcing Study. (FORGET)

Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Healthy Volunteers

Treatments: Behavioral: Interference through learning of a competing motor skill.; Behavioral: No interference

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05511480

00118731

Details and patient eligibility

About

A critical point in learning and memory research is whether memories, once consolidated, remain unchanged or whether they continue to undergo plastic changes and remodeling. While previous research has focused on experimental destabilization during early stages of the memory life cycle, i.e., during encoding or early consolidation, experimental data that provides information about the effect of destabilization interventions on well-consolidated memories is still missing. This is particularly true for the procedural memory domain, such as learning a sensorimotor skill. This project is designed to characterize the effect of a single behavioral interference intervention on a previously consolidated sensorimotor skill in a large sample of healthy volunteers recruited through an online crowdsourcing platform. In a longitudinal design, participants will perform an implicit sequence learning task over five consecutive sessions, followed by an interference intervention in session six and a follow-up evaluation of the stability of the learned skill in session seven. The experimental design includes two levels of sequential information (spatial and temporal), which allows the testing of the specificity of the interference intervention. Behavioral performance throughout the experimental sessions is acquired via the manual input on the participants' computer keyboards and used to extract the learning rate and the interference effect (primary outcome).

Enrollment: 404 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• registered Amazon Mechanical Turk users (called 'workers')
• with >95% approval rate on all previous Amazon Mechanical Turk assignments
• location in North America or Europe
• ≥18 years of age
• not having participated in this experiment before

Exclusion criteria

• prior participation in this experiment

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Triple Blind

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404 participants in 4 patient groups

Interference on sequence 1

Experimental group

Description:

The interference intervention (session six) will be applied to one of the two previously learned sequences (temporal).

Treatment:

Behavioral: Interference through learning of a competing motor skill.

Interference on sequence 2

Experimental group

Description:

The interference intervention (session six) will be applied to one of the two previously learned sequences (spatial).

Treatment:

Behavioral: Interference through learning of a competing motor skill.

Interference on sequences 1 and 2

Experimental group

Description:

The interference intervention (session six) will be applied to both of the two previously learned sequences (temporal and spatial).

Treatment:

Behavioral: Interference through learning of a competing motor skill.

No interference

Sham Comparator group

Description:

The interference intervention (session six) will be applied.

Treatment:

Behavioral: No interference