The Advantages of Adopting an Internal Focus of Attention in Visuomotor Adaptation

An external focus of attention is widely reported to benefit motor skill acquisition. In the current experiment we asked whether an external focus of attention benefits visuomotor adaptation, a motor learning task in which external (i.e., seen hand position) and internal (i.e., felt hand position) sensory cues conflict. Participants were assigned to one of three groups: external focus (n = 33), internal focus (n = 31), or control (n = 33). The external focus group was instructed to attend to the cursor movement, the internal focus group to their hand movement, and the control group received no attentional focus instructions. All participants trained to reach with cursor feedback that was rotated 40° clockwise relative to their hand motion (rotated cursor reach training). Attentional focus instructions were provided at the start of reach training and after every 40 rotated training trials. After reaching with rotated cursor feedback, explicit (conscious strategy) and implicit (unconscious) adaptation were assessed using the process dissociation procedure. Interestingly, the internal focus group adapted their reaches to a greater extent than the external focus group. Post-training assessments revealed no significant differences in explicit or implicit adaptation between all 3 groups. Together, these results suggest that focussing one's attention internally benefits visuomotor adaptation, potentially due to enhanced processing of hand proprioceptive information during training.