Who has ever been surprised to return to the bowl of salted peanuts without realizing it, even after having eating a moderate number and deciding to stop? Using rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in healthy volunteers, we investigated the neural correlates of automatic processes induced by subliminal stimuli. We demonstrated that the automatic activation of motor programs elicited unconsciously in the medial premotor cortex was normally restricted to specific contexts set by the environment, but can occur below the threshold of awareness even when no movement was executed. This novel finding expands our view on brain mechanisms underlying unconscious motor control and provides new evidence that activation of the motor preparation system and consciousness are not obligatory linked.
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