Examining Motor Awareness and Sense of Agency

Every day, we perform many tasks without thinking deeply about how we do them. For example, when making tea, we focus mainly on pouring hot water into the cup. However, we are usually unaware of the way we reach for the cup or how we shift our weight. Despite this lack of awareness, we still feel in control of our actions. This feeling of control is known as the Sense Of Agency (SoA).

Motor awareness (MA) is our ability to consciously recognize our movements. Some scientists argue that MA limits our sense of agency. They suggest that our sense of agency cannot be more sensitive to changes in movement than our ability to notice and adjust to them. Research has proposed that there is a central mechanism that works for all kinds of movements, from using our fingers to moving our entire bodies. This idea suggests that our awareness of actions is not tied to specific body parts but is rather a general system.

To investigate whether motor awareness is the same across different types of movements, researchers asked participants to complete a reaching task using two different methods: reaching with their right hand and leaning with their trunk. The goal was to see if motor awareness would be consistent despite the differences in how the body is used.

In the study, participants performed tasks with their hands and bodies under various conditions. One important part of the research was a blind reaching task. This task helped to assess how well participants could reach without seeing their movements. Additionally, the researchers introduced a dual-task scenario to see how Cognitive Load would affect motor awareness. Cognitive load refers to the mental effort necessary to complete a task. By adding a secondary task, they could see how it impacted participants' awareness of their movements.

Motor awareness is a topic that has been under study for many years. Earlier research focused mainly on arm and hand movements. This awareness is usually measured by looking at how well people can notice differences between what they see and feel about their movements. Studies have shown that people can attribute movement errors to their own actions, even if the errors are noticeable. For example, people have mistakenly thought they moved when there was a delay between their actual motion and the visual Feedback they received.

Not only quick movements but also continuous movements, like tapping fingers or walking, have been examined for motor awareness. More recent studies also explored how visual feedback during walking affects our sense of agency. The findings indicated that participants were basically the same in their awareness whether they were moving their arms or legs. This suggests that motor awareness is not specific to any one body part but instead relies on a general system.

Motor awareness is tied closely to what we are doing at the moment. It is not simply about the outcome of an action, such as pressing a button. Instead, it is about monitoring our ongoing movements. One common model for understanding how we control our movements is the comparator framework. This model states that our brains compare what we expect our movements to be with the actual sensory feedback we receive. This process helps correct small errors we might make. If the errors are larger, we notice them and can make adjustments.

While it is clear that motor awareness plays a role in how we feel about our actions, it is not yet fully understood how it works across different tasks and movements. This study aimed to evaluate if motor awareness would show the same patterns when using different parts of the body.

When participants completed the reaching tasks, the researchers analyzed how confident they felt about their movements. They looked at whether the direction of their actions or the type of feedback they received affected their awareness. It was found that the participants were less sensitive to errors when the feedback they received helped them move in the correct direction.

The findings indicated that participants generally recognized their movements well when they were not deviated. However, during the tasks where movements were intentionally deviated, some differences showed up between the two methods of reaching. For instance, participants felt they were more aware of the movements of their bodies compared to their hands in certain scenarios.

The results also revealed that the participants adapted their movements to compensate for the deviations. They adjusted their actions depending on the situation. The research showed that while motor awareness had some common patterns across movements, there were some specific differences as well.

One of the challenges in studying the sense of agency and motor awareness is how to separate out different factors. For example, while some differences in awareness were observed, they could also stem from variations in how well each method was performed. The researchers took steps to control for these differences by having participants perform both blinded and guided tasks.

Results demonstrated that the full body was generally better at reaching accurately compared to the hand. This suggests that the trunk movements may provide more reliable information for monitoring. However, when participants reached with their hands, they completed tasks with greater precision than with their trunk.

The study also wanted to see how cognitive load affected motor awareness. Participants were asked to complete a secondary task while still focusing on their movements. It was found that cognitive load had a significant impact on the participants' awareness and performance.

In the end, the study aimed to demonstrate that motor awareness might not be specific to any one body part. Both hand and trunk movements showed similarities in how participants monitored their actions. This indicates that motor awareness is likely based on a general understanding of movement rather than a specific feedback loop for each body part.

In conclusion, this research provides insights into how we are aware of our movements and how we feel connected to them. While participants showed some differences in their awareness depending on the body part they used to reach, there were many commonalities as well. The idea that motor awareness is tied to a general system rather than being specific to individual body parts opens up new avenues for understanding human movement and our sense of agency. This could have important implications not only for neuroscience but also for clinical settings, where understanding how people perceive their movements can help in rehabilitation and therapy.