Sleepwalkers are better at automatic walking

Sleepwalkers who are awake may have a multi-tasking advantage over non-sleepwalkers, according to recent research that uses virtual realilty. Try counting backwards from 200 in steps of 7 while walking en-route to your favourite café. Chances are, you will slow down or even freeze mid-stride, unless you are a sleepwalker. Breakthrough research using virtual reality has revealed significant differences in how the brains of sleepwalkers and non-sleepwalkers control and perceive body movement - a first in cognitive science. Sleepwalkers exhibit increased automation in their movements with respect to non-sleepwalkers. The results are published in Current Biology on October 23, 2017. Wearing a full-body motion capture suit in a room full of IR-tracking cameras at EPFL (Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), sleepwalkers and non-sleepwalkers were asked to walk towards a target object, in this case a virtual cylinder.