Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

We are fond of discovering patterns, regularities, and grammatical structures in sensory sequences and exploiting underlying structures. However, few sequence learning studies look at the effect of sequence motifs on memory. In this study, we ask whether the presence of motifs in sequences 1) facilitates memory recall, and 2) facilitates generalization to novel sequences sharing the same motif. We show pilot data from a sequence recall task, in which participants learned projectional motifs. The results suggest that motifs help sequence memory and recall, in addition to transferring to novel sequences sharing the same motif. Our study paves the way to a deeper understanding of how humans learn a compressed sequence representation generalizable to novel contexts.