Monitoring vs. Automatisation: Neural Resource Allocation for Human Skill Learning (C03)

• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 425899996

Skill learning leads to increasing automaticity, yet skilful behaviour remains astonishingly flexible. We propose that automaticity and flexibility both emerge with a modular and hierarchical organisation of cortical skill encoding, which provides a neural resource shared between sensory and motor systems. Combining behavioural indices of automaticity and transfer with time-resolved decoding of magnetoencephalography, we investigate how a modular hierarchy provides a key resource for human motor and perceptual skill learning, how allocation of this resource is regulated, and how a simple metacognitive intervention may improve resource allocation and accelerate learning.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1436: Neural resources of cognition
• Applicant Institution: Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg
• Project Heads: Dr. Elena Azañon; Dr. Max-Philipp Stenner