Ability to monitor deviations of own movement without visual feedback

Abstract

AbstractHow conscious sensations of movement relates to signals essential for movement control remains under investigation. This question is typically investigated using visuomotor tasks, in which sensation of movement is disturbed by conflicting visual feedback. The present study uses metacognitive judgements to investigate conscious access to movement signals, unchallenged by visual signals, in an index finger force task. We found that some participants can correctly assign metacognitive judgements (MCJs) to their own force, suggesting that participants do indeed have metacognitive access to sensorimotor signals. We found no correlation between metacognitive access to sensorimotor signal and variance in motor performance. Further, we found that in this purely sensorimotor task, internal focus of attention reduces variability in force compared to external focus of attention. Our results indicate that not only is it possible to access sensorimotor information, it is also possible to use focus of attention to reduce variability in force performance.