Abstract
Are we in command of our motor acts?The popular belief holds that our conscious decisions are the direct causes of our actions. However, overwhelming evidence from neurosciences demonstrates that our actions are instead largely driven by brain processes that unfold outside of our consciousness. To study these brain processes, scientists have used a range of different functional brain imaging techniques and experimental protocols, such as subliminal priming. Here, we review recent advances in the field and propose a theoretical model of motor control that may contribute to a better understanding of the pathophysiology of movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease.
Highlights
In daily life, we usually have the feeling that we are the authors of the actions we make, that the decisions we make and the corresponding movements we perform are consciously initiated and controlled
That is the reason why certain authors call into question the causal role of consciousness in voluntary action (Libet et al, 1983) or even the separation between automatic and controlled behavior, suggesting that automatic and unconscious processes can form an intrinsic part of all behaviors, even the most complex (Sumner and Husain, 2008)
This review aims to summarize the advances in understanding implicit mechanisms of motor decision and their underlying neural substrates by examining recent research on motor awareness and subliminal priming
Summary
We usually have the feeling that we are the authors of the actions we make, that the decisions we make and the corresponding movements we perform are consciously initiated and controlled. Our group (D’Ostilio and Garraux, 2011), have reported new fMRI evidence that such automatic and unconscious activity in motorrelated brain areas can be induced in a subliminal masked prime task with no-response stimuli, when no movement is executed In this fMRI study, healthy volunteers performed a subliminal masked prime task, in which they had to respond by pressing a left or right button depending on the direction of the arrow targets. The authors used fMRI as healthy volunteers performed the same task and found activity changes in the caudate and thalamus for the inhibition condition, an observation that is in agreement with their findings in Huntington patients This pattern of brain regions involved can lead us to rethink some motor control diseases as an impairment of theses automatic and unconscious primary processes
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