Rats' learning of a new motor skill: insight into the evolution of motor sequence learning

Recent behavioral and neural evidence has suggested that ethologically relevant sub-movements (movement primitives) are used by primates for more complex motor skill learning. These primitives include extending the hand, grasping an object, and holding food while moving it toward the mouth. In prior experiments with rats performing a reach-to-grasp-food task, we observed that especially during early task learning, rats appeared to have movement primitives similar to those seen in primates. Unlike primates, however, during task learning the rats performed these sub-movements in a disordered manner not seen in humans or macaques, e.g. with the rat chewing before placing the food pellet in its mouth. Here, in two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that for rats, learning this ecologically relevant skill involved learning to concatenate the sub-movements in the correct order. The results confirmed our initial observations, and suggested that several aspects of forepaw/hand use, taken for granted in primate studies, must be learned by rats to perform a logically connected and seemingly ecologically important series of sub-movements. We discuss our results from a comparative and evolutionary perspective.