Thursday, June 25, 2009

Unconscious motor control that conflicts with conscious awareness.

During my recent Europe vacation, on stepping onto an escalator in the Munich metro that I knew was stopped, I noticed that odd sensation accompanied by clumsy movements that is probably also familiar to you, as if my motor behavior and sensations were being guided by a “phantom” of a moving escalator. Fukui et al. show that this is the consequence of an unconscious automatic habitual motor program cued by the escalator itself. Their results suggest a dissociation between conscious awareness and subconscious motor control: the former makes us perfectly aware of the current environmental situation, but the latter automatically emerges as a result of highly habituated visual input no matter how unsuitable the motor control is.

1 comment:

  1. I'd never really thought about it, but I've always liked going up and down static escalators for that slight woozy feeling it gives you.

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