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Updated: Jun 20, 2026

The "Motor" in Implicit Motor Sequence Learning: A Foot-stepping Serial Reaction Time Task
Published on: May 3, 2018
Implicit knowledge and motor skill: what people who know how to catch don't know
Nick Reed1, Peter McLeod, Zoltan Dienes
1Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, Queen's College, Oxford, UK.
Abstract:
People are unable to report how they decide whether to move backwards or forwards to catch a ball. When asked to imagine how their angle of elevation of gaze would change when they caught a ball, most people are unable to describe what happens although their interception strategy is based on controlling changes in this angle. Just after catching a ball, many people are unable to recognise a description of how their angle of gaze changed during the catch. Some people confidently choose incorrect descriptions that would guarantee failure of interception demonstrating unconscious knowledge co-existing with systematically different conscious beliefs. Where simple solutions to important evolutionary problems exist, unconscious perception needs to be impervious to conscious beliefs.
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