Origami folding: Taxing resources necessary for the acquisition of sequential skills

Sequential skill learning with practice is fundamental to human activity (e.g., tying shoes). Given the lack of prior knowledge in most participants, Origami folding is a promising task to study the acquisition of a sequential skill. While previous Origami folding studies mainly dealt with the question, which forms of instruction can lead to better learning outcomes, we employ a dual-task approach to test which resources are necessary for folding and for improvement with practice. Participants (N = 53) folded five Origami figures for four times each, which were randomly paired with five types of secondary tasks to cause either cognitive (verbal vs. visuospatial) or motoric (isochronous vs. non-isochronous tapping) memory load or none (control condition). Origami performance showed a typical learning curve from Trial 1 (first run of folding the figure) to Trial 4 (fourth run of folding the same figure). We tested for a dissociation between variants of memory load influencing Origami folding performance vs. the variants influencing learning (i.e. change in performance across practice). In line with theories suggesting that learning operates on the level that (at a given point in practice) demands the most control, we did not observe cases where a dual-task variant influenced performance while it did not affect learning. Memory load from the cognitive visuospatial secondary task as well as the isochronous tapping secondary task interfered with improvement in Origami folding with practice. This might be due to the use of visuospatial sketchpad and absolute timing mechanism during the acquisition of Origami folding.