Online and offline contributions to motor learning change with practice, but are similar across development

Abstract

Children show motor learning deficits relative to adults across a diverse range of tasks. One mechanism that has been proposed to underlie these differences is the contribution of online and offline components to overall learning; however, these tasks have almost focused exclusively on sequence learning paradigms which are characterized by performance gains in the offline phase. Here, we examined the role of online and offline learning in a novel motor task which was characterized by warm-up decrement, i.e., a performance loss, during the offline phase. In particular, using a relatively extended practice period, we examined if differences between children and adults persist across relatively long practice periods, and if the contribution of online and offline learning is affected by age and by practice itself. Two groups of children, 8–10 years and 11–13 years old, and one group of young adults (N = 30, n = 10/group) learned a novel task that required control of upper body movements to control a cursor on a screen. Participants learned the task over 5 days and we measured movement time as the primary task performance variable. Consistent with prior results, we found that 8–10 year olds had longer movement times compared to both 11–13 year olds and adults. We also found distinct changes in online and offline learning with practice; the amount of online learning decreased with practice, whereas offline learning was relatively stable across practice. However, there was no detectable effect of age group on either online or offline learning. These results suggest that age-related differences in learning among children 8–10 years old are persistent even after extended practice but are not necessarily accounted for by differences in online and offline learning.