The serial reaction time task (SRTT) has been widely used to induce learning of a repeated motor sequence without the participants’ awareness. The task has also been of major influence for defining current concepts of offline consolidation after motor learning. The present study intended to replicate previous findings in a larger population of 53 healthy individuals. We were unable to reproduce previous results of online and offline implicit motor learning with the SRTT. Trials with a repeated sequence rapidly induced shorter reaction times compared to random trials, but this improvement was lost in a post-test obtained a few minutes after the training block. Furthermore, no offline consolidation was observed as there was no change in sequence specific reaction time gain between the post-test immediately after training and a re-test obtained 8 h after training. Online or offline learning remained absent when we modulated the number of sequence repetitions, the error levels, and the structure of random sequences. We conclude that the SRTT induces a rapid and temporary adaptation to the sequence rather than learning, since the repeated motor sequence does not seem to be encoded in memory.

连续反应时间任务 (SRTT) 已被广泛用于在参与者不知情的情况下诱导重复运动序列的学习。该任务对于定义运动学习后离线整合的当前概念也产生了重大影响。本研究旨在在更大的 53 名健康个体人群中复制先前的发现。我们无法使用 SRTT 重现以前的在线和离线隐式运动学习的结果。与随机试验相比，具有重复序列的试验迅速引起更短的反应时间，但这种改进在训练块几分钟后获得的后测中消失了。此外，没有观察到离线巩固，因为在训练后立即进行的后测和训练后 8 小时获得的重新测试之间没有序列特异性反应时间增益的变化。当我们调整序列重复次数、错误级别和随机序列的结构时，在线或离线学习仍然不存在。我们得出结论，SRTT 诱导对序列的快速和临时适应而不是学习，因为重复的运动序列似乎没有在记忆中编码。