The CNS updates its context estimate in the absence of feedback

Human motor behaviour is remarkably accurate and appropriate even though our bodies and the objects we interact with change over time. To achieve such performance the motor system has to tailor the motor commands to the current context, that is the properties of objects in the world and the prevailing environmental conditions. The current context can be estimated by integrating two sources of information, sensory feedback and knowledge about how the context is likely to have changed from the previous estimate. Here we show that in the absence of sensory feedback about the context the second process is able to extrapolate the likely evolution of the context without requiring awareness that the context is changing.