I am looking for examples of real-world tasks (e.g. jobs, situations, etc.) where habitual motor responses are a factor, for good or for bad.
For example, a situation where a simple motor task or response is performed many times in rapid succession, until it becomes 'automatic', and then when there is eventually a need to withhold from performing this task/response it is difficult to do so.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Signing one's name might be a good example of this. For example, imagine signing mortgage documents, which require both numerous signatures and initials. After only initialing multiple spaces, there may be response inhibition decrements in the tendency to keep initialing, rather than signing as needed.
For young musicians, it's often difficult to produce 'leaps' in quick passages that are mostly stepwise. Scale practice is so stressed as part of training that when asked to 'skip' one or more notes in a scale, students fail to skip, but rather perform the scale as practiced.
Example: The student practices the C scale, {CDEFGABC}; they are then asked to produce the following pitch series: {CEFGABC}. Often the student will insert "D" automatically, and learning to perform this pattern without "D" is very difficult.
Being used tip your email adress on a personal computer and then occasionally using a Mac and tipping the "at" there might be another example.
If you learn to drive using a stick shift, you are very likely to hit the brake pedal when manoeuvering with an automatic, e.g. at a car park. (You need to make sure your "clutch foot" keeps away from the pedals - this may take some effort at first).
It is oftentimes difficult to write your new age when it is not long after your birthday. This generally applies to writing dates that change on longer timescales (months, years, etc.). Your body wants to write the old one for awhile!
This might not fall within the category because I think it relates more to priming than habituation -- but I was just reading your article on "friendly fire". We have just published an article on unintended discharges and are creating a taxonomy for those. We now over another 200 incidences to analyze besides the ones we studied for our publication. Blue on blue has many causes, including unintended discharges where the bullet fired in a UD strikes another officer or themselves and also of course -- friendly fire.
As a clinical observation -- those instructing U.S. officers on active shooter training are noting a significant number of blue on blue or friendly fire shootings when they take the officers to scenario training -- even though in many of these instances the officers were informed ahead of time that another officer would be present and entering tactical from a particular location -- the active officer still shot the other responding officer. The frequency of this has not been documented but every trainer we have spoken with has serious concerns regarding the frequency of this phenomenon.
I like your effort at trying to research this phenomenon as related to Blue on Blue and encourage you to take this to a realistic scenario training involving active police or military so the true complexity of this phenomenon can be studied in an applied setting.
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