TY - JOUR TI - Consolidation alters motor sequence-specific distributed representations AU - Pinsard, Basile AU - Boutin, Arnaud AU - Gabitov, Ella AU - Lungu, Ovidiu AU - Benali, Habib AU - Doyon, Julien A2 - Verstynen, Timothy A2 - Ivry, Richard B A2 - Verstynen, Timothy A2 - Yokoi, Atsushi VL - 8 PY - 2019 DA - 2019/03/18 SP - e39324 C1 - eLife 2019;8:e39324 DO - 10.7554/eLife.39324 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.39324 AB - Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies investigating the acquisition of sequential motor skills in humans have revealed learning-related functional reorganizations of the cortico-striatal and cortico-cerebellar motor systems accompanied with an initial hippocampal contribution. Yet, the functional significance of these activity-level changes remains ambiguous as they convey the evolution of both sequence-specific knowledge and unspecific task ability. Moreover, these changes do not specifically assess the occurrence of learning-related plasticity. To address these issues, we investigated local circuits tuning to sequence-specific information using multivariate distances between patterns evoked by consolidated or newly acquired motor sequences production. The results reveal that representations in dorsolateral striatum, prefrontal and secondary motor cortices are greater when executing consolidated sequences than untrained ones. By contrast, sequence representations in the hippocampus and dorsomedial striatum becomes less engaged. Our findings show, for the first time in humans, that complementary sequence-specific motor representations evolve distinctively during critical phases of skill acquisition and consolidation. KW - motor sequence learning KW - functional MRI KW - multivariate pattern analysis KW - memory consolidation JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -