Are Humans Perceptually and Motorically Prepared for Interstellar Travel? Lessons from Microgravity for Multigenerational Spaceflight
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: As Earth faces challenges, humanity may one day need to establish permanent settlements beyond our solar system. Among the proposed solutions, generation ships (i.e., self-sustaining spacecraft designed to support multiple human generations) constitute an extreme developmental ecology in which individuals would be born and age. Interstellar travel therefore would raise not only engineering questions, but also unprecedented challenges for human perception, action, and development. Accordingly, this paper reviews the spaceflight research literature to examine how altered gravitational conditions shape perception-action coupling, sensorimotor adaptation, and cognitive-motor integration with the aim to assess how humans would be perceptually and motorically affected by interstellar travel. Microgravity literature examined changes in vestibular processing, locomotion, balance, fine motor control, and dual-task performance. Extending these findings to multigenerational spaceflights, the paper argues that individuals may develop fundamentally different perceptual-motor "organizations", affordance perceptions, and movement strategies shaped by the ecological and informational structure of the spacecraft. Drawing on ecological psychology, the review further highlights potential challenges, and it outlines implications for future research.
Source: Journal of Motor Behavior
Author: Simone Caso
Institution: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Language: English
Subfield: Physiology (medical)
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7225624017