Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 12, 2026

The "Motor" in Implicit Motor Sequence Learning: A Foot-stepping Serial Reaction Time Task
Published on: May 3, 2018
Evidence for transitional coding of human motor representations
Moritz Schaaf1, Solveig Tonn1, Katharina A Schwarz1
1Department of Psychology, Trier University.
None:
How are body movements represented? While research suggests that movements are selected and initiated by anticipating their perceptual effects, the representational content of these anticipated effects remains underspecified. Specifically, it is unknown whether effect anticipations represent desired perceptual end states or intended perceptual changes leading to these end states. Here, we introduced a novel method to distinguish between the two representational contents and applied it in three preregistered experiments. Our results consistently favored transitional codes, indicating that the mind represents and controls body movements through the perceptual changes that they reliably produce. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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