title: Conscious awareness of action potentiates sensorimotor learning.
abstract: 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.
authors: IfADo - Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Dortmund, Germany. Electronic address: boutin@ifado.de.
authors: Arnaud
authors: A
authors: Boutin
authors: National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS; CeRCA - UMR 7295), Poitiers, France; University of Poitiers, Poitiers, France.
authors: Yannick
authors: Y
authors: Blandin
authors: IfADo - Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Dortmund, Germany.
authors: Cristina
authors: C
authors: Massen
authors: IfADo - Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Dortmund, Germany.
authors: Herbert
authors: H
authors: Heuer
authors: National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS; CeRCA - UMR 7295), Poitiers, France.
authors: Arnaud
authors: A
authors: Badets
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005385:Fingers / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009048:Motor Skills / Q000502:physiology*; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Action awareness; Chunking; Sensorimotor learning; Skilled actions; Unconscious processing