Action has become a central topic in the scientific study of self-awareness. The ability to experience oneself as the cause of an action seems to be a fundamental building block supporting the sense of self. In particular awareness of action and the attribution of agency are key issues in the neuroscientific study of consciousness
Attribution of agency involves the ability to distinguish one’s own actions and their sensory consequences from those generated by another source. Efferent and afferent information jointly constitute the core of our bodily self-awareness
. Efference is a key function of the motor system, responsible for motor control, motor learning, motor prediction and motor correction
. Afference, and especially proprioception, provides us with the specific content of our bodily self-awareness
. However, afference can be the result of either self-generated actions or externally-generated sensory stimulation. Although we are normally aware of our intention to move as well as of the goal of our movements, we do not have conscious access to all our motor commands and every fine adjustment made to a movement. Nevertheless, high-precision motor control is still possible, relying on internal representations of the actual, desired, and predicted states of our body and the environment
. Certain components of these internal representations may become available to awareness when the discrepancy between the predicted and the actual sensory consequences of an action is large
[5, 6]. The exact threshold above which this perceptual-motor conflict becomes available to awareness is currently a focus of intensive research (for reviews see
[4, 7, 8]).
Under normal conditions, healthy subjects have only a limited awareness of their motor performance
. Furthermore, there are pathological cases such as patients with prefrontal lesions
[10, 11], deafferented patients
, and schizophrenic patients
, in which motor awareness is severely impaired. Impairment of self-agency and motor awareness in these patients was studied using a reaching movement paradigm, where a conflict was introduced between the actual movement of the hand and the feedback which is provided. The hand movement consisted on tracing an imaginary line between a starting point and a target on a horizontal surface. The participants’ view on their moving hand was covered to avoid direct feedback. At the same time the participants reaching trajectory was projected onto a second surface mounted directly above the movement area. A perceptual-motor conflict was introduced by providing the participants with a false visual feedback, i.e. an angular deviation of the projected trajectory. Results of these studies suggested that there are two different processes related to solving such a visuomotor conflict. For small deviations, all participants implicitly adjusted their hand trajectory to reach the target, without being aware of the process. For larger angles (∼10°) healthy participants became aware of the conflict between the perceptual and motor process, and switched to a conscious monitoring strategy
. In contrast, patients with impaired motor awareness remained unaware of the mismatch and therefore, had more difficulties to compensate for the deviation
Previous neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies have assessed the neural basis of perceptual-motor awareness and self-agency. They suggest that the cerebellum
, the parietal cortex
, the angular gyrus
, the insular cortex
[16, 17], and the prefrontal cortex
 are involved in signaling the sensory discrepancy between the predicted and the actual sensory consequences of our movements. Overall, these studies have shed light on the behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of awareness and control of actions, and have contributed to understand how abnormalities in the awareness of actions arise in several pathologies (e.g.
However, only a few studies have assessed whether it is possible to improve perceptual-motor awareness by interventions and techniques known to enhance self-awareness. One of the most prominent techniques in this sense is meditation.
One major component in most meditation techniques is the continuous monitoring of present experience which is especially true for mindfulness meditation. In this meditation technique Buddhist practitioners aim towards expanding their attention to all available inputs (sensory, bodily or mental) within consciousness in the present moment. The goal is to maintain a continuous state of moment-to-moment awareness encompassing the full experience of the present moment with certain attitudinal qualities
[18, 19]. Based on the concept of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn created a secular eight-weeks behavioral intervention program named Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which teaches not only being mindful within a meditation exercise, but also during everyday activities such as eating, washing, etc.
. Therefore mindfulness practitioners are trained in the conscious execution and continuous awareness of body movements, e.g. when reaching out for a certain object. Besides, some converging evidences support that meditation, and specifically an MBSR intervention results in changes in self-related processes. Farb et al.
 suggested that there are two different forms of self-reference: one relating only to present moment experiences, and another linking experiences with the self-concept across time in a narrative way. They demonstrated in an fMRI study that MBSR results in pronounced brain activity in a specific neural network (comprising the lateral PFC, insula, secondary somatosensory cortex and inferior parietal cortex) underlying a present moment form of self-awareness. This network overlaps with brain areas known to be specifically activated in relation to the experience of self-agency and perceptual-motor awareness (see above). This ‘neural sharing’ gives tentative support to the hypothesis that mindfulness meditation may influence perceptual-motor integration processes and self-agency.
Due to a likely suspension of many mental processes during meditation, larger cognitive resources are available within a meditation state to attend only present time processes
. In fact, meditation has a positive impact on several cognitive processes such as emotion regulation
[24, 25], increasing attention
[26, 27], pain processing
[28, 29] and perceptual rivalry
. Next to these reports, studies using MRI have demonstrated the capacity of meditation to result in neuroplasticity mechanisms in the central nervous system, which may lead to positive effects
[31–34]. Strikingly, only a few scientific studies have specifically addressed the influence of meditation practice on sensorimotor performance so far.
Telles et al.
 showed significant better visuomotor performance of yoga meditators compared to controls. These results were interpreted as a sign of plasticity in motor control systems associated to the practice of yoga meditation. Jedrczak et al.
 showed that the number of months of practice of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) significantly predicted higher performance on perceptual-motor speed tests. In contrast to these positive results, other studies have shown that TM is not associated with acquisition of fine perceptual-motor skills
[37, 38] and with learning and performance of a novel perceptual-motor task
Regarding the possible impact of meditation on perceptual-motor awareness Ranii and Rao
 showed that after 3 months of yoga meditation, participants reported greater awareness of bodily processes (i.e. bodily sensations resulting from mindful body movements through a series of poses) compared to controls.
The research body on the effects of yoga and TM on motor behavior has led to mixed results, and it is difficult to extract a clear-cut message. Mindfulness is claimed to cultivate a mental stance where internal (somatic and propioceptive aspects of the movement) and external (sensory feedbacks from movements) signals are equally perceived in a balanced way. Based on this claim, we hypothesized that mindfulness practice is an appropriate candidate to assess the impact of meditation on motor behavior.
The objective of the present study was to assess the impact of mindfulness meditation on perceptual-motor awareness, motor accuracy and movement duration in a visuomotor reaching task with false feedback as described above. This was assessed in two different comparisons. First, we compared a group of participants in the MBSR program with an age and sex-matched control group receiving no intervention. Second, we studied the performance of long-term meditators in comparison with a group with no prior experience in meditation. Our results suggest that mindfulness meditation practice is associated with slower body movements, better motor performance, and enhanced awareness of perceptual-motor conflict.