Motor learning involves learning both the order and the timing of movements.
Previous imaging experiments have studied the areas of the human brain that become engaged while subjects learn sequences of finger movements under visual guidance. The subjects are not required to learn timings in such studies, because the visual pacing cues and response intervals are constant. There were learning-related rCBF increases in the cerebellum, basal ganglia, parietal cortex and the anterior part of the supplementary motor area when subjects explicitly learned a sequence of finger movements. There were also learning-related decreases in the dorsal prefrontal cortex. In the present study we have used PET to find areas which show changes in activity during the learning of a complex visuomotor rhythm, and have plotted the changes in brain activity over 6 time points.