The ideomotor principle holds that anticipating the sensory consequences of a movement triggers an associated motor response; paper thinks it is time to generalize this principle

Ideomotor learning: Time to generalize a longstanding principle. Birte Moeller, Roland Pfister. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, July 22 2022, 104782. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104782

Highlights

• The ideomotor principle is a bedrock of contemporary approaches to action control

• Ideomotor (IM)-learning traditionally focuses on action-effect associations

• We apply the concept of common coding of action and perception to IM-learning

• The same mechanism should result in action-action and stimulus-stimulus learning

• This extension connects and integrates various approaches to human action control

Abstract: The ideomotor principle holds that anticipating the sensory consequences of a movement triggers an associated motor response. Even though this framework dates back to the 19th century, it continues to lie at the heart of many contemporary approaches to human action control. Here we specifically focus on the ideomotor learning mechanism that has to precede action initiation via effect anticipation. Traditional approaches to this learning mechanism focused on establishing novel action-effect (or response-effect) associations. Here we apply the theoretical concept of common coding for action and perception to argue that the same learning principle should result in response-response and stimulus-stimulus associations just as well. Generalizing ideomotor learning in such a way results in a powerful and general framework of ideomotor action control, and it allows for integrating the two seemingly separate fields of ideomotor approaches and hierarchical learning.

Keywords: ideomotor learningaction controlresponse-response associationstimulus-stimulus association