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Abdominal adiposity negatively associates with the rate of long term sequential skill learning

Amira Millette, Brighid Lynch, Timothy Verstynen
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/186742
Amira Millette
aDepartment of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
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Brighid Lynch
aDepartment of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
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Timothy Verstynen
aDepartment of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
bCenter for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
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Abstract

Obesity is associated with functional and structural differences in the corticostriatal systems of the brain. These pathways are known to be critical for the acquisition of complex sensorimotor skills, such as the ability to learn a coordinated sequence of actions. Thus, individual differences in obesity should be associated with reduced efficiency of learning sequential skills. Here we measured long-term sequence learning across five days of training on the serial reaction time task in a cohort of neurologically healthy adults (N=30) with body types ranging from lean to obese. As expected, individuals with a greater degree of central adiposity, measured as central waist circumference, exhibited slower rates of learning, across all training days, than their leaner counterparts. This association between learning and central adiposity was restricted to response speeds, but not accuracy. These findings show that obesity is negatively associated with the efficiency of learning a long-term sequential skill, possibly due to previously observed associations between obesity and general basal ganglia function.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted September 10, 2017.
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Abdominal adiposity negatively associates with the rate of long term sequential skill learning
Amira Millette, Brighid Lynch, Timothy Verstynen
bioRxiv 186742; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/186742
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Abdominal adiposity negatively associates with the rate of long term sequential skill learning
Amira Millette, Brighid Lynch, Timothy Verstynen
bioRxiv 186742; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/186742

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