Task relevance determines binding of effect features in action planning
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Task relevance determines binding of effect features in action planning Viola Mocke 1
&
Lisa Weller 1 & Christian Frings 2 & Klaus Rothermund 3 & Wilfried Kunde 1
Published online: 10 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Action planning can be construed as the temporary binding of features of perceptual action effects. While previous research demonstrated binding for task-relevant, body-related effect features, the role of task-irrelevant or environment-related effect features in action planning is less clear. Here, we studied whether task-relevance or body-relatedness determines feature binding in action planning. Participants planned an action A, but before executing it initiated an intermediate action B. Each action relied on a body-related effect feature (index vs. middle finger movement) and an environment-related effect feature (cursor movement towards vs. away from a reference object). In Experiments 1 and 2, both effects were task-relevant. Performance in action B suffered from partial feature overlap with action A compared to full feature repetition or alternation, which is in line with binding of both features while planning action A. Importantly, this cost disappeared when all features were available but only bodyrelated features were task-relevant (Experiment 3). When only the environment-related effect of action A was known in advance, action B benefitted when it aimed at the same (vs. a different) environment-related effect (Experiment 4). Consequently, the present results support the idea that task relevance determines whether binding of body-related and environment-related effect features takes place while the pre-activation of environment-related features without binding them primes feature-overlapping actions. Keywords Action planning . Motor control . Binding . Effect anticipations
Introduction How do humans plan motor actions? A possible, so-called ideo-motor, view on this process originates from the idea that we generate motor activities by setting up a mental representation of the perceptual effects that a certain motor activity will produce (Greenwald, 1970; James, 1981; Shin, Proctor, & Capaldi, 2010; Stock & Stock, 2004). Anticipating an action effect, which is “a change of sensory input that is triggered by a bodily movement” (Pfister, 2019, p. 154), should reactivate
the bodily movement to which the action effect has been associated through previous experience. Indeed, there is now ample evidence that such perceptual representations mediate action production (Elsner & Hommel, 2001; Kunde, Koch, & Hoffmann, 2004; Pfister, 2019; Pfister & Kunde, 2013; Shin & Proctor, 2012). In other words, motor activities seem to be mentally represented and planned in terms of those perceptual events that a to-be-accessed motor activity will foreseeably produce.
Feature codes in action planning * Viola Mocke [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
2
Department of Psychology, University of Trier, Trier, Germany
3
Department of Psyc
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