Conscious awareness of action potentiates sensorimotor learning.
Many everyday skills are unconsciously learned through repetitions of the same behaviour by binding independent motor acts into unified sets of actions. However, our ability to be consciously aware of producing newly and highly trained motor skills raises the question of the role played by conscious awareness of action upon skill acquisition. In this study we strengthened conscious awareness of self-produced sequential finger movements by way of asking participants to judge their performance in terms of maximal fluency after each trial. Control conditions in which participants did not make any judgment or performance-unrelated judgments were also included. Findings indicate that conscious awareness of action, enhanced via subjective appraisal of motor efficiency, potentiates sensorimotor learning and skilful motor production in optimising the processing and sequencing of action units, as compared to the control groups. The current work lends support to the claim that the learning and skilful expression of sensorimotor behaviours might be grounded upon our ability to be consciously aware of our own motor capability and efficiency.
['Boutin|Arnaud|A|', 'Blandin|Yannick|Y|', 'Massen|Cristina|C|', 'Heuer|Herbert|H|', 'Badets|Arnaud|A|']
D000293:Adolescent D001364:Awareness D003243:Consciousness D005260:Female D005385:Fingers D006801:Humans D007858:Learning D008297:Male D009048:Motor Skills D009068:Movement D011930:Reaction Time D055815:Young Adult
Sensorimotor learning Action awareness Chunking Skilled actions Unconscious processing