Inducing motor skill improvements with a declarative task

During sequence learning, individuals show motor- skill acquisition and an ability to verbally describe items within the sequence. We disrupted this latter, declarative component by having participants learn a word list immediately after sequence learning. This induced off- line skill improvements. We conclude that off- line memory processing relies not only on the engagement of neuroplastic mechanisms but also on the disengagement of an interaction between declarative and procedural memory systems.