Ideomotor Act

An ideomotor act (ideo- + lat. motor setting in motion; synonym ideomotor reaction) is involuntary movements caused by the idea of ​​them.

Ideomotor acts arise under the influence of thoughts, images or ideas without conscious control and effort on the part of the person. A classic example of an ideomotor act is the movement of a vine by a dowser while searching for water. The dowser imagines finding water, and this vision causes involuntary movements of the vine in his hands.

Ideomotor acts underlie such phenomena as automatic writing, Ouija boards, and seances. They are also used in some psychotherapeutic techniques. The ability to cause ideomotor acts at will requires special psychological preparation and training.

Ideomotor acts: study of the phenomenon and its significance for cognitive psychology

Introduction

Ideomotor or ideosensory acts are involuntary bodily actions or reactions caused by mental representations of objects of perception. This phenomenon was first described by the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1920. He proposed the term “ideo” to denote the internal, and “motor” to denote the sensory perceptible, which generally means “internal motor act.” Later, the concept of “ideomotor” was introduced by the American psychologist Evelyn Hartshorne, who addressed the problem of children’s first attempts to discover the concept of the external world and use new meaningful ideographic representations, visual models and tactile sensorimotor coordination for this. Then the German researcher Margaret von Wisson-Orth and the American psychologist Gordon Allport became interested in ideomotor acts. A number of neurophysiological explanations for ideomotor acts have been put forward. Typically these explanations assume that our body is an integral part of our perception and that there is no obvious difference between perception and action. We will now touch on each of these explanations in detail. However, all of them rightly noted