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Obligatory Co-opting of Motor Control by Awareness

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Zengbo Xie¹, Huijun Wang², Feng Shu², Yuhui Huang², Pingping Qiu², Yiting Liu², Lanting Qiu¹, Qiuhai Yue², René Marois^1,3,4; ¹Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA., ²School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China, ³Vanderbilt Brain Institute, ⁴Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.

What is awareness good for? Nowhere has this question been more debated than in the context of volition, with some arguing that awareness has a causal (predictive) role and others favoring an interpretative (postdictive) function. This question has been difficult to answer because awareness and motor control are normally tightly intertwined. Here we used blinking as a novel paradigm to tease apart the role of awareness in volition as that motor act is readily performed under either conscious or unconscious command. The first two behavioral experiments (each n=24) assessed whether merely monitoring one’s blinking influence that behavior by comparing video analyses of blinks’ global statistics (e.g. blinking rate) and local kinematics (e.g. blinking amplitude) under spontaneous (participants are unaware of their blinks), conscious (participants report when they blink) and voluntary (participants blink at their own will) conditions. The results revealed that conscious blinks are kinematically different from spontaneous blinks but are indistinguishable from voluntary blinks. The functional convergence between conscious and voluntary blinks is not facultative: it is impervious to explicit instructions and incentives to blink spontaneously (Experiment 3) and does not habituate to multiple session repetitions (Experiment 4). Finally, two EEG experiments show that a component of a well-known electrophysiological marker of voluntary motor preparation, the readiness potential, is present in both voluntary and conscious blinks but absent in spontaneous blinks. Evidently, we cannot be passive observers of our own blinking behavior: mere awareness of that impending motor act inevitably seizes its control.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Motor control