Effects of Cognitive Awareness via Explicit Instruction and a Large Perturbation on Hand Localization Following Motor Adaption

Explicit awareness of a task is often beneficial in improving performance. However, the effects of awareness of perturbations on the resulting sensory and motor changes are not well understood. Here, we manipulate awareness of a visuomotor perturbation during a reaching task and test resulting changes in perceived and predicted sensory consequences, and implicit motor changes. We split participants into 4 groups which differ in both magnitude of the rotation, and whether they receive a strategy to counter the rotation. We find equal amounts of implicit learning across all groups. Likewise, we find that changes in estimates of felt hand position, reflecting updates in proprioception and efference based estimates, are not modulated by either instruction or perturbation size. Our results indicate that not all processes of motor learning benefit from explicit awareness of the task. Particularly, proprioceptive recalibration and the updating of predicted sensory consequences are largely implicit processes.