Conscious awareness of others’ actions during observational learning does not benefit motor skill performance

•Conscious awareness of actions represents an encoding factor for motor sequences.•This factor impacts differently physical and observational practice.•No benefits of conscious awareness of others’ actions during motor sequence learning by observation.•Conscious awareness of actions during observational practice impairs only sequence knowledge. The conscious awareness of motor success during motor learning has recently been revealed as a learning factor. In these studies, participants had to learn a motor sequence and to detect when they assumed the execution had reached a maximal fluidity. The consciousness groups showed better motor performance during a delayed post-training test than the non-consciousness control groups. Based on the “similar mechanism” hypothesis between observational and physical practice, we tested this beneficial effect of the conscious awareness of action in an observational learning context. In the present study, two groups learned a motor sequence task by observing a videotaped human model performing the task. However, only the consciousness group had to detect the maximal fluidity of the learning human model during observational practice. Unpredictably, no difference was detected between groups during the post-training test. However, the consciousness group outperformed the non-consciousness control group for tests that assessed the motor knowledges.