Getting Better, But All the Time? The Consolidation of a Motor Skill in Children, Young Adults, Young Adults with ADHD and the Elderly

A tacitly accepted notion is that children are better than adults in the acquisition of skills (`how to`, procedural knowledge), an advantage that presumably reflects a higher potential for plasticity in children`s brains. Nevertheless, in many laboratory tasks, wherein training leads to skill and procedural memory, young adults not only outperform children, but also seem to benefit from the training experience as much as (if not more than) children. Adults and children show not only significant within-session (on-line) gains in performance, but also significant delayed (off-line) gains, the latter reflecting procedural memory consolidation processes. I`ll present data in support of the notion that as we develop and mature, procedural memory consolidation processes are more stringently controlled (gated). In some learning conditions, stringent gating may lead to less-than-expected delayed performance gains. This may be the case in the elderly and in individuals with ADHD; however, post-training sleep can override these constraints on procedural memory consolidation in both groups. I`ll argue, therefore, that more stringent gating may constitute an advantage by affording more selectivity in what is to be consolidated into long-term memory; it is implemented through changes in the time windows in which new knowledge can be tested for relevancy and consistency before it is allowed to consolidate. Thus, puberty, senescence, as well as atypical attention mechanisms bring about more stringent selectivity to long-term memory rather than a decrease in the potential for plasticity per se.