Sequence in a sequence: Learning of auditory but not visual patterns within a multimodal sequence

The current study investigates whether a unimodal visual and a unimodal auditory sequence is learned separately in a multimodal learning situation. In two experiments participants faced a modified version of the Serial Reaction-Time task, in which auditory and visual elements followed each other, forming a multimodal sequence as well as two unimodal sequences. Learning of both the multimodal and the unimodal sequences were tested. Results showed evidence of multimodal sequence learning. The unimodal sequence formed by the auditory stimuli was also learned, while participants did not acquire the concurrent visual sequence. The experiments argue for a domain- and modality-general sequence learning mechanism that is more sensitive to auditory and response-based information than to visual information.