Learn and Perform Actions

            In the article “Neural Correlates of Skill acquisition: Decreased Cortical Activity during a Serial Interception Sequence Learning Task,” it is conveyed that a study has been done to learn how people do certain actions using their motor skills. In the article, I was stated that to do necessary actions, a person has to learn various motor skills that are very complex and also learn the order and timing of those actions. This means that a person should learn how to use certain motor skills to perform necessary actions in the correct order at a certain time. A Serial Interception Sequence Learning task was used to assess participants about how the participant learned a series of tasks or activities in a repetitive sequence. After the participant learned the initial repeating sequence, an MRI was used to collect data about everything the participant had learned through a series of actions with certain timing patterns. Through the data collected it can be concluded that there was reduced activity in a sequence that was practiced in a distributed bilateral network such as extrastriate occipital, parietal, and premotor cortical regions. The reduced activity shows improved efficiency in many regions of the brain such as visuospatial processing, spatio-motor integration, motor planning and execution of actions for a certain sequence of actions. Also, through the data it can also be concluded that the repetitive sequence also increased the activity in the left ventral striatum and the prefrontal cortex regions of the brain. These changes studied and concluded through data that was collected tells us that a person who learns a series of repetitive sequences has the ability to express this or her actions in the correct order at a certain time.

            Comparing this to the article “The Brain and the Nervous System,” it can be concluded that the various actions that the human body performs are results of the signals that the brain sends to each part of our body through different nerves. When the body is exposed to a certain stimuli in a particular situation, the brain transmits electrical neural impulses that directs the body to perform the necessary actions in a certain way. This can be connected to the article “Neural Correlates of Skill acquisition: Decreased Cortical Activity during a Serial Interception Sequence Learning Task” in that when a person is exposed to learning different actions over a period of time, the brain develops the instinct of performing those actions when presented with the same or similar situations as the person was in when first learning those actions. Therefore, when the person is exposed to the same or similar stimuli as they were exposed to when learning certain action sequences, then the brain will transmit impulses that will lead the body to perform the same actions as they have when they learned the actions when under certain conditions. From this it can be concluded that when a person is under certain conditions and learns certain actions then he or she will perform those same learned actions when presented with same or similar conditions. 

Works Cited

Gobela, Eric W., Todd B. Parrishc, and Paul J. Reber. "Neural Correlates of
     Skill Acquisition: Decreased Cortical Activity during a Serial Interception
     Sequence Learning Task." NeuroImage. 1150-57. Elsevier, 12 July 2011. Web.
     25 Apr. 2015. <https://luc.app.box.com/s/4c031c26bsh2bj3619si/1/
     2926649109/25084735987/1>.

"The Brain and Nervous System." How Stuff Works. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 May 2015.
     <http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/nervous-system/
     brain-nervous-system-ga.htm>.