Congruent sonification during practice impairs cue-reduced recall in a virtual reality rhythm-game task

Rhythm-game learning naturally couples auditory and visual information, but always-available sensory cues may act as guidance and limit performance when those cues are withdrawn. We tested whether congruent sonification during practice strengthens a trajectory representation or instead promotes cue dependency in a virtual reality (VR) rhythm-game task.

Forty right-handed participants learned a fixed 15-bar left/center/right trajectory sequence in VR. Across 24 sets, participants practiced with visual feedback only in the Control group or with congruent audiovisual feedback in the Sonification group. Each set comprised three feedback-rich practice trials followed by a silent memory-test trial in which the note stream and auditory feedback were removed. Performance was quantified by the accuracy (hit rate) and the practice-to-test decrement (Δhit rate).

Practice hit rate improved similarly in both groups and plateaued around 80%. In contrast, cue-reduced silent-test performance diverged late in training (sets 22-24): the Control group outperformed the Sonification group (hit rate: 81.9%±9.4% vs. 68.4%±18.4%, p _adj = 0.023, Cliff's δ = 0.495). The practice-to-test decrement also indicated greater cue dependency with sonification (Δhit rate: 1.6%±7.4% vs. -10.7%±18.5%, p _adj = 0.0044, Cliff's δ = 0.590).

Despite comparable acquisition, sound-guided practice reduced performance when auditory and visual cues were withdrawn, consistent with the guidance hypothesis and specificity-of-practice accounts. These results suggest that VR motor training should match the intended execution context or employ faded sonification schedules to promote robust retention.