Beyond encoding: Brain mechanisms for interactions and enhancement of acquired skills

Abstract

Skill learning is not merely about encoding—it is a dynamic process that continues to evolve long after initial acquisition. Once formed, skills undergo various unconscious processes in the brain. In this talk, I will explore post-encoding interaction and enhancement, focusing on visual and motor skill learning. First, I will introduce our research on the interactions of visual skills. In successive training sessions on a visual task, an acquired visual skill can be disrupted by subsequent training—an effect known as retrograde interference. However, we found that without conscious awareness of trained visual features, the subsequent training unexpectedly improved performance on the first-trained skill, indicating a retrograde facilitation effect. These results suggest that conscious awareness transforms that would otherwise be facilitative interactions between two visual skills into disruptive ones. Second, I will present our ongoing research on reactivation of a once-consolidated motor skill. Using exoskeleton-assisted movement reconstruction, we demonstrated that somatosensory feedback is essential for motor skill enhancement through reactivation—while voluntary execution of movement itself is not required. Furthermore, by applying decoding techniques to EEG data, we found that activity patterns corresponding to motor skills are reinstated in the brain after reactivation. These findings suggest that post-encoding brain processes play a crucial role in integrating and strengthening acquired skills. Understanding these mechanisms provides new insights into how the unconscious process in the brain shapes and refines skills beyond initial learning.

Bio

Dr. Shibata obtained a PhD in Science from Nara Institute of Science and Technology in 2008. He subsequently worked at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Boston University, and Brown University as a postdoctoralresearcher; Nagoya University as an associate professor; and the National Institute for Quantum Science and Technology as a principal researcher. He currently leads the Lab for Human Cognition and Learning at RIKEN Center for Brain Science as a team director.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=MtolH1MAAAAJ