Tri Nguyen¹, W. Ryan Waite¹, Joo-Hyun Song¹; ¹Brown University

Our recent work (Guo et al., 2025) showed that participants who practiced a virtual ball-throwing task developed a stable motor timing that selectively improved sensitivity to matching auditory temporal intervals. This motor-perceptual link appears to emerge from learned temporal structure, but the cognitive resources supporting it remain unexplored. Based on evidence showing that individual differences in sensorimotor skill acquisition are related to visuospatial working memory capacity, the present study examined whether spatial working memory contributes to this motor-perceptual link. Over two days, participants practiced the virtual ball-throwing task and, between throws, performed one of three interleaved tasks: an auditory interval discrimination task in which the intervals matched the timing structure of the motor task (N = 17), an auditory pitch discrimination task that introduced motor-irrelevant information (N = 17), and a control task with minimal cognitive load (N = 35). Replicating prior work, improvement in temporal sensitivity was greatest in the interval group, where perceptual intervals matched the timing characteristics of the practiced movement. Crucially, to examine the role of working memory, we used participants’ spatial working memory capacity to predict motor and perceptual performance. Working memory capacity was most predictive of both motor and perceptual performance in the interval group, especially during the early learning phase. The influence of working memory was less pronounced in the pitch group, where the perceptual information was irrelevant to participants’ emerging motor timing, and in the control group, where cognitive load was low. These findings suggest that spatial working memory supports the maintenance and integration of spatiotemporal information across motor and perceptual systems during motor learning, contributing to changes in perceptual sensitivity that reflect the temporal structure of practiced actions.