Deliberate rule violations have typically been addressed from a motivational perspective that asked whether or not agents decide to violate rules based on contextual factors and moral considerations. Here we complement motivational approaches by providing a cognitive perspective on the processes that operate during the act of committing an unsolicited rule violation. Participants were tested in a task that allowed for violating traffic rules by exploiting forbidden shortcuts in a virtual city maze. Results yielded evidence for sustained cognitive conflict that affected performance from right before a violation throughout actually committing the violation. These findings open up a new theoretical perspective on violation behavior that focuses on processes occurring right at the moment a rule violation takes place.

Rule compliance is pivotal for the regulation of social behaviour. Still, humans deliberately violate rules at times – be it for personal reasons or for a higher good. Whereas previous research has studied the preconditions and consequences of rule violations, essentially nothing is known about the cognitive processes right at the moment a rule violation takes place. Here we show that merely labeling an action as rule violation induces a strong conflict between rule violation and compliance, as revealed by participants’ bias towards rule complying motor actions. Moreover, conflict that comes with violating a rule was much stronger than conflict that comes with following an alternative rule, even if both decisions result in the same observable behavior. These observations open a new theoretical perspective on rule violation behavior, shifting the focus toward the cognitive processes operating during the very act of rule violation.

Ideomotor accounts to human action control posit that human agents represent actions in terms of their perceivable consequences; selecting, planning, and initiating a voluntary action is thus assumed to be mediated by action-effect anticipations. Corresponding empirical investigations have often employed arbitrary effects in the agent’s environment to study action-effect learning and effect-based action control. This strategy has provided accumulating evidence in support of ideomotor mechanisms but the widespread focus on environment-related action effects has also created misperceptions of what ideomotor accounts aim to explain. Moreover, this strategy also has given rise to misunderstandings of critical epistemological limitations, especially regarding the theoretical relevance of negative results in common experimental paradigms. These recent developments call for a theoretical clarification of the concept of action effects. I propose that many misunderstandings can be resolved by embracing the theoretical role of body-related as compared to environment-related actions effects. I show how the concept of such effects may inform current debates and how this focus can guide future research related to ideomotor action control, with a main challenge being the derivation of testable and falsifiable theories from the ideomotor framework.

Imitation is assumed to serve crucial functions in social interaction such as empathy and learning; yet these functions only apply to the imitating observer. Here, we reveal a distinct function of imitation for the action model: Anticipating to be imitated facilitates the production of own motor actions. Specifically, anticipated motor responses of social counterparts serve as mental cues to retrieve corresponding motor commands in order to orchestrate one’s own actions.

Factorial designs lend themselves to a variety of analyses with Bayesian methodology. The de-facto standard is Bayesian Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with Monte Carlo integration. Alternative, and readily available methods, are Bayesian ANOVA with Laplace approximation as well as Bayesian t-tests for individual effects. This simulation study compared the three approaches regarding ordinal and metric agreement of the resulting Bayes Factors for a 2x2 mixed design. Simulation results indicate remarkable disagreement of the three methods in certain cases, particularly when effect sizes are small and studies include small sample sizes. Findings further replicate and extend previous observations of substantial variability of ANOVAs with Monte Carlo integration across different runs of one and the same analysis. These observations showcase important limitations of current implementations of Bayesian ANOVA. Researchers should be mindful of these limitations when interpreting corresponding analyses, ideally applying multiple approaches to establish converging results.

Response durations for simple keypress responses are an easily available but heavily underused measure that comes with great promise to uncover unique perspectives on cognitive processing. Whereas response times dominate the toolbox of experimental psychologists and cognitive modelers alike, we highlight that any study with standard keypress responses also yields the complementary measure of response durations, i.e., the time from response onset to response offset. Here we highlight several recent observations indicating that this inconspicuous measure deserves much more attention than it has attracted so far. Given that it comes at no extra cost for common experimental setups, any researcher is well advised to consider adopting response durations into their empirical toolbox.

As early as 1783, the almost forgotten philosopher, metaphysicist, and psychologist Ferdinand Ueberwasser (1752-1812), designated himself “Professor für empirische Psychologie und Logik”, professor of empirical psychology and logic, at the University of Münster, Germany. His position was initiated and supported by the minister and educational reformer Franz von Fürstenberg (1729-1810), who considered psychology a core scientific discipline, to be taught at each school and university. At the end of the 18th century, then, psychology seems to have been on the verge of becoming an independent academic discipline, about 100 years before Wilhelm Wundt founded the discipline’s first official laboratory. It seems surprising that Ueberwasser’s writings – including a seminal textbook on empirical psychology – have been almost entirely overlooked by most historical accounts. We focus on this important founding moment of psychological science, and on the circumstances that eventually brought this seminal development to a halt.

As the empirical study of action control via ideomotor effect-anticipations continues to uncover more and more aspects of this fundamental process, it is time to look back to the 19th century roots of the theory to assess which classic ideas are supported by contemporary research. In turn, classic ideas might stimulate studies on aspects of the ideomotor mechanism that have not yet been addressed empirically. The present article is a tribute to this classical work – more precisely to the article “Der Apparat des Willens” [The Apparatus of Will], published by Emil Harleß 150 years ago. At a closer look, Harleß does not only present a concise description of the ideomotor mechanism; he also presents a wealth of intriguing ideas that deserve empirical investigation.

What actually is a p-value for? And what is a significant result? This book answers such questions by providing a compact introduction to inferential statistics. Our major focus is on the logic of inferential statistics and hypothesis testing: We cover the logic behind statistical tests, we then walk through the most common procedures (t-test, analysis of variance with and without repeated measures, correlation/regression) and discuss pitfalls of data analysis. The book thus helps developing a solid understanding of how common test procedures work, and how to interpret their results correctly. Hands-on examples from everyday research – including exemplary calculations with the programs SPSS and R – supplement each chapter. In addition to classical methods, we briefly discuss recent developments in psychological research methods.

This book is a translation of the original German 3rd edition of “Inferenzstatistik Verstehen” by Markus Janczyk and Roland Pfister. It is based on an AI-powered machine translation (by the service DeepL.com), with thorough follow-up editing by both authors.

Dieses Buch bietet eine kompakte und verständnisorientierte Einführung in die Inferenzstatistik. Ein Schwerpunkt ist dabei die zugrundeliegende Logik der Inferenzstatistik und des Hypothesentestens. Dies ermöglicht es, die Tücken der Datenauswertung kennenzulernen und Ergebnisse richtig zu interpretieren. Darüber hinaus wird die Logik auf die gängigsten Verfahren (t-Test, Varianzanalyse mit und ohne Messwiederholung, Korrelation/Regression) übertragen. Eine Ergänzung liefern Beispiele aus dem Forschungsalltag inklusive exemplarischer Auswertungen mit den Programmen SPSS und R. Die zweite Auflage bietet neben zahlreichen sprachlichen Überarbeitungen verschiedene Querverweise auf aktuelle Entwicklungen der psychologischen Methodenforschung.

Mouse-tracking is regarded as a powerful technique to investigate latent cognitive and emotional states. However, drawing inferences from this manifold data source bears the risk of several pitfalls, especially when using aggregated data rather than single-trial trajectories. Researchers might arrive at wrong conclusions because averages lump together two distinct contributions that speak towards fundamentally different mechanisms underlying between-condition differences: influences from online-processing during action execution and influences from incomplete decision processes. Here, we propose a simple method to assess these factors, thus allowing to probe whether process-pure interpretations are appropriate. By applying this method to data from twelve published experiments on ideomotor action control, we show that the interpretation of previous results changes when dissociating online processing from decision and initiation errors. Researchers using mouse-tracking to investigate cognition and emotion are therefore well-advised to conduct detailed trial-by-trial analyses, particularly when they test for direct leakage of ongoing processing into movement trajectories.

Establishing causal beliefs by observing regularities between actions and events in the environment is a crucial part of goal-directed behavior. Sense of agency (SoA) describes the corresponding experience of generating and controlling actions and subsequent events. Investigating how SoA adapts to situational changes in action-effect contingency, we observed even singular disturbances of perfect action-effect contingencies to yield a striking impact on SoA formation. Moreover, we additionally included disturbances of regularity that are not directly linked to one’s own actions. Doing so allowed us to investigate how SoA might be a concept that goes beyond own actions towards a more generalized, subjective representation of control regarding environmental events. Indeed, the present experiments establish that, while SoA is highly tuned toward action-effect relations, it is also sensitive to events that occur without one’s own action contribution. SoA thus appears to be exceptionally sensitive to singular breakpoints of perfect control with agents disproportionally incorporating such events during SoA formation while at the same time building on a rich situation model.

Factorial designs lend themselves to a variety of analyses with Bayesian methodology. The de-facto standard is Bayesian Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with Monte Carlo integration. Alternative, and readily available methods, are Bayesian ANOVA with Laplace approximation as well as Bayesian t-tests for individual effects. This simulation study compared the three approaches regarding ordinal and metric agreement of the resulting Bayes Factors for a 2x2 mixed design. Simulation results indicate remarkable disagreement of the three methods in certain cases, particularly when effect sizes are small and studies include small sample sizes. Findings further replicate and extend previous observations of substantial variability of ANOVAs with Monte Carlo integration across different runs of one and the same analysis. These observations showcase important limitations of current implementations of Bayesian ANOVA. Researchers should be mindful of these limitations when interpreting corresponding analyses, ideally applying multiple approaches to establish converging results.

People often cannot remember the source of their memories despite recalling other elements of a remembered event correctly. Observation inflation is one such error of source monitoring. It refers to remembering actions of another agent as self-performed. While the existence of this memory error is well documented, it is not clear how it relates to other errors of source attribution: It is not evident whether the phenomenon reflects (1) a specific tendency to appropriate the actions of other agents, (2) a general confusion of sources with overlapping features or (3) whether it is a confound induced by the complex structure of the conventionally used experimental paradigm. We conducted two online experiments to assess these potential contributions to observation inflation. Crucially, administering a full source monitoring test revealed a symmetrical pattern: Recognizing other’s actions as one’s own occurred at the same rate as misattributing one’s own actions to another agent. The findings resonate with source-monitoring frameworks by suggesting that source attribution errors arise due to the similarity of the sources, whereas the evidence speaks against a special status for appropriating observed actions.

A central mechanism of human action control is the prompt binding between actions and the stimuli provoking them. Perceiving the same stimuli again retrieves any bound responses, facilitating their execution. An open question is whether such binding and retrieval only emerges when stimulus-response rules are known upon taking action or also when agents are forced to guess and receive feedback about whether they were successful or not afterward. In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that knowing rules before responding would boost binding between stimuli and responses during action-taking relative to guessing situations. Second, we assessed whether the content of the feedback matters for binding in that agents might use feedback to build correct stimulus-response bindings even for wrong guesses. We used a sequential prime-probe design to induce stimulus-response binding for prime responses that were either rule-based or guesses and to measure retrieval of these bindings in response times and errors in the probe. Results indicate that binding and retrieval emerge for successful but not for wrong guesses. Binding effects for correct guesses were consistently small in effect size, suggesting that pre-established stimulus-response bindings from instructed rules might indeed boost binding when taking action.

Perception and action rely on integrating or binding different features of stimuli and responses. Such bindings are short-lived, but they can be retrieved for a limited amount of time if any of their features is re-activated. This is particularly true for stimulus-response bindings, allowing for flexible recycling of previous action plans. A relation to learning of stimulus-response associations suggests itself, and previous accounts have proposed binding as an initial step of forging associations in long-term memory. The evidence for this claim is surprisingly mixed, however. Here we propose a framework that explains previous failures to detect meaningful relations of binding and learning by highlighting the joint contribution of three variables: (1) decay, (2) the number of repetitions, and (3) the time elapsing between repetitions. Accounting for the interplay of these variables provides a promising blueprint for innovative experimental designs that bridge the gap between immediate bindings on the one hand and lasting associations in memory on the other hand.

Objective: Four web-based experiments investigated flexibility of disembodiment of a virtual object that is no longer actively controlled. Emphasis was on possibilities to modify the timescale of this process. Background: Interactions with virtual objects are commonplace in settings like teleoperation, rehabilitation, and computer-aided design. These objects are quickly integrated into the operator’s body schema (embodiment). Less is known about how long such embodiment lasts. Understanding the dynamics of this process is crucial because different applied settings either profit from fast or slow disembodiment. Method: To induce embodiment, participants moved a 2D virtual hand through operating a computer mouse or touchpad. After initial embodiment, participants either stopped or continued moving for a fixed period of time. Embodiment ratings were collected continuously during each trial. Results: Results across all experiments indicated that embodiment for the virtual hand gradually increased during active use and gradually decreased after stopping to use it. Disembodiment unfolded nearly twice as fast as embodiment and showed a curved decay pattern. These dynamics remained unaffected by anticipation of active control that would be required in an upcoming task. Conclusion: The results highlight the importance of continuously experiencing active control in virtual interactions if aiming at inducing stable embodiment of a virtual object. Application: Our findings suggest that applications of virtual disembodiment such as virtual tools or interventions to affect a person’s body representation critically depend on continuous updating of sensorimotor experience. However, if switching between virtual objects, for example, during teleoperation or video gaming, after-effects are unlikely to affect performance.

Features of actions are bound to coincidentally occurring stimuli so that reencountering a stimulus retrieves a previous action episode. One hallmark of the purported mechanism in binding/retrieval tasks is a reliable reaction time advantage for repeating a previous response if tone stimuli repeat rather than alternate across trials. Other measures than reaction times yielded surprisingly mixed results, however. This is particularly true for continuous response features like force or response duration. We therefore conducted two experiments to resolve this disconnect between different measures. Experiment 1 tested for a potentially inflated effect in reaction time data, whereas Experiment 2 took the converse approach of studying conditions that would elicit similarly strong effects on alternative measures. Our results show that confounds in terms of auditory change detection do not inflate reaction time differences, reinforcing an interpretation of these effects as reflecting binding and retrieval. Moreover, strong effects on alternative measures appeared if these features were rendered task-relevant and came with sufficient variability. These observations provide critical evidence for binding and retrieval accounts, especially by showing that these accounts extend from binary decisions to continuous features of an actual motor response.

Creative ideation can be driven by honorable objectives, but also by nefarious intentions. Even though this dark side of creativity gained scientific attention recently, the underlying cognitive processes remain poorly understood. In a preregistered experiment, we applied the process-tracing method of mouse tracking to precisely assess the cognitive underpinnings of malevolent creativity. Participants (N = 67 adults) chose between either a creative or a traditional use for a visually presented item while the creative use was either positive or negative. Consistent with prior research, choice frequencies and movement trajectories indicated a strong preference for traditional over creative responses. This bias, however, was not affected by the valence of the more creative alternative. Moreover, exploratory analyses suggest that negative creative ideas might be retrieved easier for actors who are prone to antisocial rule-violation. We conclude that traditional beliefs and procedures hamper positive and negative creativity alike, attesting to a pervasive impact of traditional ideas on creative behavior.

We assessed the relation of creativity and unethical behaviour by manipulating the thinking style of participants (N = 450 adults) and measuring the impact of this manipulation on the prevalence of dishonest behaviour. Participants performed one of three inducer tasks: the alternative uses task to promote divergent thinking, the remote associates task to promote convergent thinking, or a simple classification task for rule-based thinking. Before and after this manipulation, participants conducted the mind game as a straightforward measure of dishonesty. Dishonest behaviour increased from before to after the intervention, but we found no credible evidence that this increase differed between induced mindsets. Exploratory analyses did not support any relation of trait creativity and dishonesty either. We conclude that the influence of creative thinking on unethical behaviour seems to be more ambiguous than assumed in earlier research or might be restricted to specific populations or contexts.

Voluntary actions are accompanied by a sense of control over this action and its effects. Forming an appropriate sense of control (or sense of agency) has widespread consequences of individual and societal relevance. Moreover, perceived control might serve as a powerful action motivator, although this critical function has been addressed scarcely so far. Thus, in two experiments (N = 101 adults for each study), we directly examined the value of control for human agents by allowing participants to choose between financial gain and situational control. Crucially, a significant share of participants chose to be in control even when this option was less financially rewarding. That is, participants had to be offered 66% (Study 1) and 34% (Study 2) of expected asset earnings as an additional reward to make them predictably waive control. In addition to the value of objective decision rights, we also measured subjectively perceived control. This is a further extension of prior research as similar levels of objective control can lead to substantially different subjective feelings of control. Hereby, we found a share of the participants to engage in potential coping behavior in situations of little objective control, maybe to create an illusionary sense of agency. These results portray perceived control as a powerful motivator for human behavior that comes with a unique and quantifiable value for individual agents.

Creativity is a driving force for human development and has fascinated scholars for centuries. Surprisingly little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of putting creative ideas into action, however. To shed light on this part of the creative process, we tracked how hand movements unfolded when choosing between either a traditional or a creative use of a given object. Participants could freely decide between both options (Experiment 1, N = 51 adults) or were prompted to select a specific use (Experiment 2, N = 51 adults). Temporal as well as spatial measures of action unfolding revealed behavior to be strongly biased towards traditional options when choosing an available, more creative option eventually. Creative behavior thus comprises two obstacles: not only coming up with new ideas, but also overcoming a lasting bias towards using old ones.

Mouse tracking and the recording of movement trajectories have become powerful tools to investigate cognitive processes. Dedicated analysis software for this type of data is now readily available to empirical researchers, promising a substantial simplification of the required data processing tasks. However, existing solutions are designed for specific recording software or analysis workflows, thus lacking the flexibility to adapt analyses to individual needs. The R package mousetRajectory addresses this gap. By placing strong emphasis on code clarity and modularity, it facilitates customization for researchers, especially those favoring a modern tidyverse programming style. Here, we provide concise example analyses that explain the essential preprocessing tools, such as time normalization or resampling, and key functions for computing trajectory markers. These markers include classic spatial metrics such as area under the curve and maximum absolute deviation along with more advanced measures such as sample entropy. In summary, mousetRajectory offers a toolkit for researchers seeking a lightweight and easily adaptable foundation for custom analyses of 2D movement trajectory data.

When a movement triggers effects with incompatible features, conflict between action and effect features creates costs for action planning and initiation. We investigated whether such action control costs also factor into action choices in terms of the principle of least effort. Participants completed a reaction-time experiment, where they were instructed to perform left and right mouse swipes in response to directional cues presented on the screen. Participants could select between two action options on each trial: Depending on which part of the screen (upper or lower) the action was performed in, the swipe resulted in a visual stimulus moving in the same (compatible) or in the opposite (incompatible) direction as the mouse. Incompatible action–effect mappings did indeed incur action control costs. In accordance with effort avoidance, the proportion of compatible choices was significantly above chance level, suggesting that action selection and initiation costs factor into participants preferences. Interestingly, however, participants’ choice tendencies were not predicted by the actual increase in action-initiation costs in the incompatible condition. This indicates that effort-related decisions are not simply based on monitoring performance in the actual task, but they are also influenced by preestablished notions of action-planning costs.

Performing an action to initiate a consequence in the environment triggers the perceptual illusion of temporal binding. This phenomenon entails that actions and following effects are perceived to occur closer in time than they do outside the action-effect relationship. Here we ask whether temporal binding can be explained in terms of multisensory integration, by assuming either multisensory fusion or partial integration of the two events. We gathered two datasets featuring a wide range of action-effect delays as a key factor influencing integration. We then tested the fit of a computational model for multisensory integration, the statistically optimal cue integration (SOCI) model. Indeed, qualitative aspects of the data on a group-level followed the principles of a multisensory account. By contrast, quantitative evidence from a comprehensive model evaluation indicated that temporal binding cannot be reduced to multisensory integration. Rather, multisensory integration should be seen as one of several component processes underlying temporal binding on an individual level.

We present consensus definitions of perception-action integration concepts. While these concepts are used in the action control literature that embraces an event-coding perspective, we think that these definitions will prove valuable to guide and streamline action-control research in general.

People regularly encounter various types of conflict. Here, we ask if, and, if so, how, different types of conflict, from lab-based Stroop conflicts to everyday-life self-control or moral conflicts, are related to one other. We present a framework that assumes that action–goal representations are hierarchically organized, ranging from concrete actions to abstract goals. The framework’s key assumption is that conflicts involving more abstract goals (e.g., self-control/moral conflict) are embedded in a more complex action space; thus, to resolve such conflicts, people need to consider more associated goals and actions. We discuss how differences in complexity impact conflict resolution mechanisms and the costs/benefits of resolving conflicts. Altogether, we offer a new way to conceptualize and analyze conflict regulation across different domains.

Rules are often stated in a negated manner (“no trespassing”) rather than in an affirmative manner (“stay in your lane”). Here, we build on classic research on negation processing and, using a fingertracking design on a touchscreen, we show that following negated rather than affirmative rules is harder as indicated by multiple performance measures. Moreover, our results indicate that practice has a surprisingly limited effect on negated rules, which are implemented more quickly with training, but this effect comes at the expense of reduced efficiency. Only affirmative rules are thus put into action efficiently, highlighting the importance of tailoring how rules are communicated to the peculiarities of the human mind.

Human actions sometimes aim at preventing an event from occurring. How these to-be-prevented events are represented, however, is poorly understood. Recent proposals in the literature point to a possible divide between effect-producing, operant actions, and effect-precluding, prevention actions, suggesting that the control of operant actions relies on codes of environment-related effects whereas prevention actions do not. Here we report two experiments on this issue, showing that spatial features (Experiment 1) as well as temporal features (Experiment 2) of a to-be-prevented event influence actions in the same way as corresponding features of to-be-produced effects. This implies that selecting and executing prevention actions relies on anticipated environmental changes, comparable to operant actions.

Distributing complex actions across agents is commonplace in human society. The objective efficiency of joint actions comes with critical challenges for the sense of agency of individual agents, complicating an accurate formation of these agents’ perceived control over actions and action outcomes. Here we report a new experimental paradigm to investigate sense of agency for supervisors and subordinates in hierarchical settings. Results indicate profound differences in the sense of agency between both roles, while also indicating additional contributions of such situational factors as degrees of freedom, action decision vs. action execution, outcome valence, and veto options. We further observed a tight coupling of sense of agency and sense of responsibility, with only weak links to affective responses to the action outcome.

In three experiments, we examined the cognitive underpinnings of self-serving dishonesty by manipulating cognitive load under different incentive structures. Participants could increase a financial bonus by misreporting outcomes of private die rolls without any risk of detection. At the same time, they had to remember letter strings of varying lengths. If honesty is the automatic response tendency and dishonesty is cognitively demanding, lying behavior should be less evident under high cognitive load. This hypothesis was supported by the outcome of two out of three experiments. We further manipulated whether all trials or only one random trial determined payoff to modulate reward adaptation over time (Experiment 2) and whether payoff was framed as a financial gain or loss (Experiment 3). The payoff scheme of one random or all trials did not affect lying behavior and, discordant to earlier research, facing losses instead of gains did not increase lying behavior. Finally, cognitive load and incentive frame interacted significantly, but contrary to our assumption gains increased lying under low cognitive load. While the impact of cognitive load on dishonesty appears to be comparably robust, motivational influences seem to be more elusive than commonly assumed in current theorizing.

Repeatedly encountering a stimulus biases the observer’s affective response and evaluation of the stimuli. Here we provide evidence for a causal link between mere exposure to fictitious news reports and subsequent voting behavior. In four pre-registered online experiments, participants browsed through newspaper webpages and were tacitly exposed to names of fictitious politicians. Exposure predicted voting behavior in a following mock election, with a consistent preference for frequent over infrequent names, except when news items were decidedly negative. Follow-up analyses indicated that mere media presence fuels implicit personality theories regarding a candidate’s vigor in political contexts. News outlets should therefore be mindful to cover political candidates as evenly as possible.

Response durations for simple keypress responses are an easily available but heavily underused measure that comes with great promise to uncover unique perspectives on cognitive processing. Whereas response times dominate the toolbox of experimental psychologists and cognitive modelers alike, we highlight that any study with standard keypress responses also yields the complementary measure of response durations, i.e., the time from response onset to response offset. Here we highlight several recent observations indicating that this inconspicuous measure deserves much more attention than it has attracted so far. Given that it comes at no extra cost for common experimental setups, any researcher is well advised to consider adopting response durations into their empirical toolbox.

The Theory of Event Coding (TEC) has influenced research on action and perception across the last two decades. It integrates several seminal empirical phenomena and it has continued to stimulate novel experimental approaches on the representational foundations of action control and perceptual experience. Yet, many of the most notable results surrounding TEC originate from an era of psychological research that relied on rather small sample sizes as judged by today’s standards. This state hampers future research aiming to build on previous phenomena. We therefore provide a multi-lab reassessment of six classical observations: response-effect compatibility, action-induced blindness, response-effect learning, stimulus-response binding, code occupation, and short-term response-effect binding. Our major goal is to provide precise estimates of corresponding effect sizes to facilitate future scientific endeavors. These effect sizes turned out to be considerably smaller than in the original reports, thus allowing for informed decisions on how to address each phenomenon in future work. Of note, the most relevant results of the original observations were consistently obtained in the present experiments as well.

When telling a lie, humans might engage in stronger monitoring of their behavior than when telling the truth. Initial evidence has indeed pointed towards a stronger recruitment of capacity-limited monitoring processes in dishonest than honest responding, conceivably resulting from the necessity to overcome automatic tendencies to respond honestly. Previous results suggested monitoring to be confined to response execution however, whereas the current study goes beyond these findings by specifically probing for post-execution monitoring. Participants responded (dis)honestly to simple yes/no questions in a first task and switched to an unrelated second task after a response-stimulus interval of 0 ms or 1000 ms. Dishonest responses did not only prolong response times in Task 1, but also in Task 2 with a short response-stimulus interval. These findings support the assumption that increased monitoring for dishonest responses extends beyond mere response execution, a mechanism that is possibly tuned to assess the successful completion of a dishonest act.

The cognitive system readily detects and corrects erroneous actions by establishing episodic bindings between representations of the acted upon stimuli and the intended correct response. If these stimuli are encountered again, they trigger the retrieval of the correct response. Thus, binding and retrieval efficiently pave the way for future success. The current study set out to define the role of the erroneous response itself and explicit feedback for the error during these processes of goal-based binding and retrieval. Two experiments showed robust and similar binding and retrieval effects with and without feedback and pointed towards sustained activation of the unbound, erroneous response. The third experiment confirmed that the erroneous response is more readily available than a neutral alternative. Together, the results demonstrate that episodic binding biases future actions toward success, guided primarily through internal feedback processes, while the erroneous response still leaves detectable traces in human action control.

The duration of an action can be critical to accomplish specific goals. Empirical findings and theoretical considerations suggest that different stages of action planning and execution require different specification levels of action features. It is assumed that at first only crude categorical features are integrated into action plans, which are then specified by subsequent sensorimotor processes during action execution based on situational conditions. In two experiments, we investigated if the integration of action duration into action plans indeed relies exclusively on categorical duration representations or also on continuous metric representations. Participants responded to visual prime and probe stimuli with short and long key presses. The duration of the prime response was indicated by a previous response cue, the duration of the probe response was indicated by the shape of the probe stimulus. Analyses of response durations revealed that for response category repetitions from prime to probe, the actual durations of the repeated responses were more similar for shape repetitions than for shape switches. This indicates that continuous temporal information is integrated into an action plan and subsequently retrieved by stimulus repetition. Our results suggest that action duration is integrated into the action plan in a relatively precise form at an early stage of action planning.

Discrete task-relevant features of an overt response, such as response location, are bound to, and retrieved by coincidentally occurring auditory stimuli. Here we studied whether continuous, task-irrelevant response features like force or response duration also become bound to, and retrieved by such stimuli. In two experiments we asked participants to carry out a pinch which produced a certain auditory effect in a prime part of each trial. In a subsequent probe part, tones served as imperative stimuli which either repeated or changed as compared to the effect tone in the prime. We conjectured that the repetition of tones should result in more similar responses in terms of force output and duration as compared to tone changes. Most parameters did not show notable indications for such similarity increases, including peak force or area under force curve, though the correlation between response durations in prime and probe was higher when tones repeated rather than changed from prime to probe. We discuss these results regarding perceptual discriminability and deployment of attention to different nominally task-irrelevant aspects of pinch responses.

Human action control is highly sensitive to action-effect contingencies in the agent’s environment. Here we show that the subjective sense of agency (SoA) contributes to this sensitivity as a subjective counterpart to instrumental action decisions. Participants (N = 556) experienced varying reward probabilities and were prompted to give summary evaluations of their SoA after a series of action-effect episodes. Results first revealed a quadratic relation of contingency and SoA, driven by a disproportionally strong impact of perfect action-effect contingencies. In addition to this strong situational determinant of SoA, we observed small but reliable interindividual differences as a function of gender, assertiveness, and neuroticism that applied especially at imperfect action-effect contingencies. Crucially, SoA not only reflected the reward structure of the environment but was also associated with the agent’s future action decisions across situational and personal factors. These findings call for a paradigm shift in research on perceived agency, away from the retrospective assessment of single behavioral episodes and towards a prospective view that draws on statistical regularities of an agent’s environment.

Previous research, mainly focusing on the situational preconditions of rule violations, indicates that feelings of being watched by other agents promote rule compliance. However, the cognitive underpinnings of this effect and of rule violations in general have only attracted little scientific attention yet. In this study, we investigated whether cues of being observed not only reduce the likelihood of violating rules but also affect the underlying cognitive processes of such behavior when still putting a rule violation into action. Therefore, we applied a motion-tracking paradigm in which participants could violate a simple stimulus-response mapping rule while being faced with pictures of either open or closed eyes. In line with prior research, temporal and spatial measures of the participants’ movements indicated that violating this rule induced substantial cognitive conflict. However, conflict during rulebreaking was not moderated by the eye stimuli. This outcome suggests that rule retrieval constitutes an automatic process which is not or is only barely influenced by situational parameters. Moreover, our results imply that the effect of perceived observation on rule conformity is driven by normative influences on decision-making instead of social facilitation of dominant action tendencies.

Previous studies demonstrated binding and retrieval of stimuli and correct responses even for those episodes in which the actual response was wrong (goal-based binding and retrieval). In the current study, we tested whether binding based on a co-activation of stimuli and erroneous responses occurred simultaneously with goal-based binding, which could have been masked by a more efficient retrieval of goal-based bindings in previous studies. In a pre-registered experiment (n = 62), we employed a sequential prime-probe design with a three-choice colour categorisation task. Including three different responses in the task allowed us to conduct separate tests for stimulus-based episodic retrieval of either the correct response (goal-based) or of the actual erroneous response (coactivation-based) after committing an error. Replicating previous findings, our study provides support for goal-based binding of stimuli and correct responses after errors, while showing that there is no independent coactivation-based binding of the erroneous response itself.

Post-error slowing is one of the most widely employed measures to study cognitive and behavioral consequences of error commission. Several methods have been proposed to quantify the post-error slowing effect, and we discuss two main methods: The traditional method of comparing response times in correct post-error trials to response times of correct trials that follow another correct trial, and a more recent proposal of comparing response times in correct post-error trials to the corresponding correct pre-error trials. Based on thorough re-analyses of two datasets, we argue that the latter method provides an inflated estimate by also capturing the (partially) independent effect of pre-error speeding. We propose two solutions for improving the assessment of human error processing, both of which highlight the importance of distinguishing between initial pre-error speeding and later post-error slowing.

Re-encountering a stimulus retrieves nominally relevant, categorical response features related to previous action decisions in response to this stimulus. Whether binding and retrieval extend to nominally irrelevant, metric features relating to an actual body movement is unknown, however. In two experiments, we thus tested whether repeating target or distractor stimuli across trials retrieves the irrelevant duration of spatial responses to these stimuli. We found subtle indication of such retrieval by task-relevant target stimuli, suggesting that binding and retrieval also operate on metric features of a motor response. In contrast, there was no sign of binding and retrieval of metric features for distractor stimuli. We discuss these observations regarding the representation of action episodes during action-related decision making and during actual movement initiation and control.

The sociomotor framework outlines a possible role of social action effects for human action control, suggesting that anticipated partner reactions are a major cue to represent, select, and initiate own body movements. Here, we review studies that elucidate the actual content of social action representations and that explore factors that can distinguish action control processes involving social and inanimate action effects. Specifically, we address two hypotheses on how the social context can influence effect-based action control: First, by providing unique social features such as body-related, anatomical codes, and second, by orienting attention towards any relevant feature dimensions of the action effects. The reviewed empirical work presents a surprisingly mixed picture: While there is indirect evidence for both accounts, previous studies that directly addressed the anatomical account showed no signs for the involvement of genuinely social features in sociomotor action control. Furthermore, several studies show evidence against the differentiation of social and non-social action effect processing, portraying sociomotor action representations as remarkably non-social. A focus on enhancing the social experience in future studies should therefore complement the current database to establish whether such settings give rise to the hypothesized influence of social context.

The ideomotor principle holds that anticipating the sensory consequences of a movement triggers an associated motor response. Even though this framework dates back to the 19th century, it continues to lie at the heart of many contemporary approaches to human action control. Here we specifically focus on the ideomotor learning mechanism that has to precede action initiation via effect anticipation. Traditional approaches to this learning mechanism focused on establishing novel action-effect (or response-effect) associations. Here we apply the theoretical concept of common coding for action and perception to argue that the same learning principle should result in response-response and stimulus-stimulus associations just as well. Generalizing ideomotor learning in such a way results in a powerful and general framework of ideomotor action control, and it allows for integrating the two seemingly separate fields of ideomotor approaches and hierarchical learning.

The human cognitive system houses efficient mechanisms to monitor ongoing actions. Upon detecting an erroneous course of action, these mechanisms are commonly assumed to adjust cognitive processing to mitigate the error’s consequences and to prevent future action slips. Here we demonstrate that error detection has far earlier consequences by feeding back directly onto ongoing motor activity, thus cancelling erroneous movements immediately. We tested this prediction of immediate auto-correction by analyzing how the force of correct and erroneous keypress actions evolves over time while controlling for cognitive and biomechanical constraints relating to response time and the peak force of a movement. We conclude that the force profiles are indicative of active cancellation by showing indications of shorter response durations for errors already within the first 100 ms, i.e., between the onset and the peak of the response, a timescale that has previously been related solely to error detection. This effect increased in a late phase of responding, i.e., after after response force peaked until its offset, further corroborating that it indeed reflects cancellation efforts instead of consequences of planning or initiating the error.

Binding and retrieval of stimulus features, response features, and their attentional weighting tune cognitive processing to situational demands. The two mechanisms promote successful actions, especially in situations in which such actions depend on controlled processing. Here we explored binding and retrieval of attentional control-states that follow from erroneous actions. By definition, such errors are characterized by insufficient cognitive control but at the same time, error detection has been shown to trigger corresponding adjustments to prevent future failures. We reanalyzed existing datasets and conducted a novel experiment to investigate whether error-induced control states become bound to task-relevant stimuli. The results point to binding and retrieval of these control states; however, the effect appears to be less reliable than for binding and retrieval of specific stimulus and response features. We further discuss potential alternative interpretations of the observed effects in terms of a mediating impact of lingering error-induced control that extends over several behavioral instances. Our results enhance current perspectives on the interplay of control adaption and episodic binding and retrieval in action control.

Human perception and action rely on a fundamental binding mechanism that forges integrated event representations from distributed features. Encountering any one of these features later on can retrieve the whole event, thus expediting cognitive processing. The traditional view on binding confines it to successful action episodes, holding that the human cognitive system does not leverage errors for optimizing corresponding event representations. Here we use sequential analyses of erroneous action episodes to explore whether binding promotes future successful behavior even when actions go awry. Results indicate that the processes leading to binding integrate different aspects of the action episode in a highly efficient and flexible manner to privilege future correct actions and prepare the ground for error-based learning.

Evidence from multisensory body illusions suggests that body representations may be malle-able, for instance, by embodying external objects. However, adjusting body representations to current task demands also implies that external objects become disembodied from the body representation if they are no longer required. In the current web-based study, we in-duced the embodiment of a 2D virtual hand that could be controlled by active movements of a computer mouse or on a touchpad. Following initial embodiment, we probed for disembod-iment by comparing two conditions: Participants either continued moving the virtual hand or they stopped moving and kept the hand still. Based on theoretical accounts that conceptual-ize body representations as a set of multisensory bindings, we expected gradual disembodi-ment of the virtual hand if the body representations are no longer updated through correlated visuomotor signals. In contrast to our prediction, the virtual hand was instantly disembodied as soon as participants stopped moving it. This result was replicated in two follow-up experi-ments. The observed instantaneous disembodiment might suggest that humans are sensitive to the rapid changes that characterize action and body in virtual environments and hence adjust corresponding body representations particularly swiftly.

Research on the sense of agency has proliferated a range of explicit and implicit measures. However, the relation of different measures is poorly understood with especially mixed findings on the correlation between explicit judgments of agency and the implicit perceptual bias of temporal binding. Here, we add to the conundrum by showing that the two sub-components of temporal binding - action-binding and effect-binding, respectively - are not correlated across participants either, suggesting independent processes for both components. Research on inter-individual differences regarding the sense of agency is thus well-advised to rely on other implicit measures until the phenomenon of temporal binding is better understood.

Human agents draw on a variety of explicit and implicit cues to construct a sense of agency for their actions and the effects that these actions have on the outside world. Associative mechanisms binding actions to their immediate effects support the evolution of agency for operant actions. However, human agents also often act to prevent a certain event from occurring. Such prevention behavior poses a critical challenge for the sense of agency as successful prevention inherently revolves around the absence of a perceivable effect. By assessing the psychological microstructure of singular operant and prevention actions we show that this comes with profound consequences: agency for prevention actions is only evident in explicit but not in implicit measures. These findings attest to an altered action representation in prevention behavior and support recent proposals to model related processes such as avoidance learning in terms of propositional rather than associative terms.

Body representations are readily expanded based on sensorimotor experience. A dynamic view of body representations, however, holds that these representations cannot only be expanded but that they can also be narrowed down by disembodying elements of the body representation that are no longer warranted. Here we induced illusory ownership in terms of a moving rubber hand illusion and studied the maintenance of this illusion across different conditions. We observed ownership experience to decrease gradually unless participants continued to receive confirmatory multisensory input. Moreover, a single instance of multisensory mismatch – a hammer striking the rubber hand but not the real hand – triggered substantial and immediate disembodiment. Together, these findings support and extend previous theoretical efforts to model body representations through basic mechanisms of multisensory integration. They further support an updating model which suggests that embodied entities fade from the body representation if they are not refreshed continuously.

Bayes Factor estimation for Bayesian Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) typically relies on iterative algorithms that, by design, yield slightly different results on every run of the analysis. The variability of these estimates is surprisingly large, however: The present simulations indicate that repeating one and the same Bayesian ANOVA on a constant dataset often results in Bayes Factors that differ by a factor of 2 or more within only a few runs when using common analysis procedures. Results may at times even suggest evidence for the null hypothesis of no effect on one run while supporting the alternative hypothesis on another run. These observations call for a cautious approach to the results of Bayesian ANOVAs at present, and I outline three possibilities to circumvent or minimize this limitation.

It has been proposed that statistical integration of multisensory cues may be a suitable framework to explain temporal binding, that is, the finding that causally related events such as an action and its effect are perceived to be shifted towards each other in time. A multisensory approach to temporal binding construes actions and effects as individual sensory signals, which are each perceived with a specific temporal precision. When they are integrated into one multimodal event, like an action-effect chain, they affect this events perception depending on their relative reliability. We test whether this assumption holds true in a temporal binding task by manipulating certainty of actions and effects. Two experiments suggest that a relatively uncertain sensory signal in such action-effect sequences is shifted more towards its counterpart than a relatively certain one. This was especially pronounced for temporal binding of the action towards its effect but could also be shown for effect binding. Other conceptual approaches to temporal binding cannot easily explain these results and the study therefore adds to the growing body of evidence endorsing a multisensory approach to temporal binding.

Binding between representations of stimuli and actions and later retrieval of these compounds provide efficient short-cuts in action control. Recent observations indicate that these mechanisms are not only effective when action episodes go as planned, but they also seem to be at play when actions go awry. Moreover, the human cognitive system even corrects traces of error commission on the fly because it binds the intended but not actually executed response to concurrent task-relevant stimuli, thus enabling retrieval of a correct, but not actually executed response when encountering the stimulus again. However, a plausible alternative interpretation of this finding is that error commission triggers selective strengthening of the instructed stimulus-response mapping instead, thus promoting its efficient application in the future. The experiment presented here makes an unequivocal case for episodic binding and retrieval in erroneous action episodes by showing binding between task-irrelevant stimuli and correct responses.

Imitating someone’s actions influences social-affective evaluations and motor performance for the action model and the imitator alike. Both phenomena are explained by the similarity between the sensory and motor representations of the action. Importantly, however, theoretical accounts of action control hold that actions are represented in terms of their sensory effects, which encompass features of the movement but also features of an action’s consequence in the outside world. This suggests that social-affective consequences of imitation should not be limited to situations in which the imitator copies the model’s body movements. Rather, the present study tested whether copying the perceived action-effects of another person without imitating the eventual body movements increases the social-affective evaluation of this person. In three experiments, participants produced visual action-effects while observing videos of models who performed either the same or a different movement and produced either the same or a different action-effect. If instructions framed the action in terms of the movement, participants preferred models with similar movements (Experiment 1). However, if instructions framed the action in terms of the to-be produced action-effect in the environment, participants preferred models with similar action-effects (Experiment 2 & 3). These results extend effect-based accounts of action control like the ideomotor framework and suggest a close link between action control and affective processing in social interactions.

The continuous tracking of mouse- or finger-movements has become an increasingly popular research method to investigate cognitive and motivational processes such as decision making, action planning and executive functions. In the present paper, we evaluate and discuss how apparently trivial design choices of researchers may impact participants’ behavior, and consequently a study’s results. We first provide a thorough comparison of mouse- and finger-tracking setups on the basis of a Simon task. We then varied a comprehensive set of design factors, including spatial layout, movement extent, time of stimulus onset, size of the target areas, and hit detection in a finger-tracking variant of this task. We explored the impact of these variations on a broad spectrum of movement parameters that are typically used to describe movement trajectories. Based on our findings, we suggest several recommendations for best practice that avoid some of the pitfalls of the methodology. Keeping these recommendations in mind will allow for informed decisions when planning and conducting future tracking experiments.

Several law systems punish nonactions such as failures to render assistance, although it is unknown if people spontaneously experience a sense of authorship for the consequences of their not acting. Here we provide evidence that events caused by deliberate choices not to act can indeed give rise to a vivid sense of agency. In three experiments, participants reported a sense of agency for events following nonactions and, crucially, temporal binding between nonactions and subsequent consequences suggested a sense of agency for nonactions even at an implicit level. These findings indicate that a sense of agency is not confined to overt body movements. At the same time, agency was more pronounced when the same event resulted from an action rather than being the consequence of a nonaction, highlighting the importance of ascribing different degrees of responsibility for the consequences of acting and not acting.

In social interactions, own actions often trigger a particular response from the other person. The sociomotor framework proposes that this consistent behavior of others can become incorporated into own action control. In line with this idea, recent studies have shown that own motor actions are facilitated if they are predictably being imitated rather than counterimitated by a social interaction partner. In the present study, we investigated whether this finding is influenced by the relationship between the interacting persons. To that end, we manipulated whether a participant was being imitated and counterimitated by an ingroup or by an outgroup member. In two experiments, we found a beneficial influence of being imitated irrespective of group membership. The results suggest that, while people incorporated their partner’s behavior into own action control, this was not further qualified by group membership as a higher-order social variable. This finding points to a universal account of action control for actions with social action effects and actions with inanimate action effects alike.

A previous study on ideomotor action control showed that predictable action effects in the agent’s environment influenced how an action is carried out. If participants were required to perform a forceful keypress, they exerted more force when these actions would produce a quiet compared to a loud tone, and this observation suggests that anticipated proprioceptive and auditory action effects are integrated with each other during action planning and control. In light of the typically weak influence of body-related effect found in recent work, we aimed to extend this pattern of results to the intra-modal case of integrating proprioceptive/tactile feedback of a movement and following vibro-tactile effects. Our results suggest that the same weighted integration process as for the cross-modal case applies to the intra-modal case. These observations support the idea of a common mechanism which binds all action-related features in an integrated action representation, irrespective of whether these features relate to exafferent or reafferent signals.

We examined two questions regarding the interplay of planned and ongoing actions. First: Do endogenous (free-choice) and exogenous (forced-choice) triggers of action plans activate similar cognitive representations? And, second: Are free-choice decisions biased by future action goals retained in working memory? Participants planned and retained a forced-choice action to one visual event (A) while executing an immediate forced-choice or free-choice action (action B) to a second visual event (B); then the retained action (A) was executed. We found performance costs for action B if the two action plans partly overlapped versus did not overlap (partial repetition costs). This held true even when action B required a free-choice response which indicates that forced-choice and free-choice actions are represented similarly. Partial repetition costs for free-choice actions were evident regardless of whether participants did or did not show free-choice response biases. Also, a subset of participants showed a bias to freely choose actions that did not overlap (vs. did overlap) with the action plan retained in memory, which led to improved performance in executing action B and recalling action A. Because cognitive effort is likely required to resolve feature code competition and confusion assumed to underlie partial repetition costs, this free-choice decision bias may serve to conserve cognitive effort and preserve the future action goal retained in working memory.

Human actions often aim at triggering certain responses from social interaction partners, but these responses do not always come as expected. Here we show that unexpected partner errors trigger sustained monitoring and that this monitoring exceeds the level that is observed if participants are faced with a machine malfunction rather than an error of an interaction partner (Experiment 1). Critically, this pattern of results emerged even though both types of errors were signaled by physically identical events in an oddball task, ruling out alternative explanations in terms of differential bottom-up factors. Unexpected delays in the action-effect sequence, however, did not trigger increased monitoring for social as compared to non-social situations (Experiment 2). These results indicate that mechanisms of performance monitoring might be recruited especially when facing the variability that is inherent in social interactions.

Spatial action–effect binding denotes the mutual attraction between the perceived position of an effector (e.g., one’s own hand) and a distal object that is controlled by this effector. Such spatial binding can be construed as an implicit measure of object ownership, thus the belonging of a controlled object to the own body. The current study investigated how different transformations of hand movements (body-internal action component) into movements of a visual object (body-external action component) affect spatial action–effect binding, and thus implicit object ownership. In brief, participants had to bring a cursor on the computer screen into a predefined target position by moving their occluded hand on a tablet and had to estimate their final hand position. In Experiment 1, we found a significantly lower drift of the proprioceptive position of the hand towards the visual object when hand movements were transformed into laterally inverted cursor movements, rather than cursor movements in the same direction. Experiment 2 showed that this reduction reflected an elimination of spatial action–effect binding in the inverted condition. The results are discussed with respect to the prerequisites for an experience of ownership over artificial, noncorporeal objects. Our results show that predictability of an object movement alone is not a sufficient condition for ownership because, depending on the type of transformation, integration of the effector and a distal object can be fully abolished even under conditions of full controllability.

Interacting agents may anticipate their partner’s upcoming response and include it in their action plan. In turn, observing an overt response triggers agents to adapt. But while anticipation and adaptation are known to shape action control, their interplay in social interactions remains largely unexplored. In four experiments, we asked how both of these mechanisms could contribute to one striking phenomenon: Agents initiate actions faster when they know their partner will produce a compatible rather than an incompatible response. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the compatibility between agents’ actions and partners’ responses, and investigated the interplay between adaptation and anticipation within the same dyadic interaction. In Experiments 2-4 we isolated the contribution of each of the two mechanisms by having agents interact with virtual partners whose responses could be experimentally controlled. We found that adaptation and anticipation exert parallel but independent effects on action execution: Participants initiated their actions more quickly when the upcoming partner response was compatible and, independently, when their partner had responded more quickly on the preceding trial. These findings elucidate models of action control in social interactions.

An object appears smaller in the periphery than in the center of the visual field. In two experiments (N = 24), we demonstrate that visuospatial attention contributes substantially to this perceptual distortion. Participants judged the size of central and peripheral target objects after a transient, exogenous cue directed their attention to either the central or the peripheral location. Peripheral target objects were judged to be smaller following a central cue whereas this effect disappeared completely when the peripheral target was cued. This outcome suggests that objects appear smaller in the visual periphery not only due to the structural properties of the visual system but also due to a lack of spatial attention.

Human action control relies on representations that integrate perception and action, yet the relevant research is scattered over various experimental paradigms and the theorizing is overly paradigm-specific. To overcome this obstacle, we propose BRAC (Binding and Retrieval in Action Control), an overarching, integrative framework explaining a wide range of seemingly unrelated findings by assuming two core processes: feature binding and retrieval . In contrast to previous approaches, we define binding and retrieval as functionally different, separable processes, independently contributing to observed effects. Furthermore, both processes are independently modulated by top-down and/or bottom-up processes. BRAC organizes the literature on action control in novel ways and relates various, independently investigated action-related phenomena from different research fields to each other.

Processing negated mental representations comes with a price: Not only are negations harder to resolve than affirmative statements, but they may even invoke ironic effects, producing the exact opposite of the intended outcome. Negation effects also behave ironically when subjected to high-frequency training; when they are confronted often, the difficulty to process negations strangely increases. Here we show that negation effects can be mitigated under certain circumstances. Based on models of cognitive control and conflict adaptation, we hypothesized that negation effects diminish when two criteria are met: negations have to be resolved not only frequently, but also just recently. We confirmed this prediction in two experiments by using an innovative, two-dimensional finger tracking design, in which we measured the influence of the original semantic content during negation processing via temporal and spatial measures. Negation effects were present throughout the experiment, but were reduced after recent negations, particularly during or after a high-frequency negation context. The combined influence of frequency and recency thus seems to be the most successful and promising attempt to mitigate ironic negation effects on overt behavior.

The sociomotor framework proposes that people can represent their actions in terms of the behavior these actions evoke in others, so that anticipating the behavior of others triggers own actions. In social interactions, such as imitation, it thus highlights the acting model rather than the responding person. In line with this idea, motor actions are facilitated if they are foreseeably imitated rather than counterimitated by a social partner. In the present study, we investigate how exactly another’s behavior is represented in such sociomotor actions. The effect of being imitated can be explained by two distinct forms of compatibility between model and imitator actions: correspondence of anatomical features (imitative compatibility) and correspondence of spatial features (spatial compatibility). Both types of features often go hand in hand, though research on motor priming shows that spatial and anatomical features of other’s actions are represented independently. We therefore investigated to which degree the benefit of anticipated imitation is caused by spatial or imitative compatibility. Across five experiments, we found that only spatial compatibility of the imitator’s behavior influenced the model’s actions, while imitative compatibility had no influence. Actors thus seem to represent actions of their social partners mainly in terms of non-social, spatial features.

The sense of agency, i.e., the notion that we as agents are in control of our own actions and can affect our environment by acting, is an integral part of human volition. Recent work has attempted to ground agency in basic mechanisms of human action control. Along these lines, action-effect binding has been shown to affect explicit judgments of agency. Here, we investigate if such action-effect bindings are also related to temporal binding which is often used as an implicit measure of agency. In two experiments, we found evidence for the establishment of shortterm action-effect bindings as well as temporal binding effects. However, the two phenomena were not associated with each other. This finding suggests that the relation of action control and agency is not a simple one, and it adds to the evidence in favor of a dissociation between subjective agency and perceptual biases such as temporal binding.

The sense of agency, i.e., the feeling of control over one’s own actions and their consequences in the environment, is a crucial part of action taking. In experimental studies, agency is most commonly measured either directly via explicit agency ratings or indirectly via implicit measures, e.g., temporal binding. In order to aid our interpretation of previous and future results, several studies have focused on relating implicit and explicit measures of agency to one another. However, possibly due to different methodological issues, results have been far from conclusive. In the present study, we therefore contribute to this discussion by further characterizing temporal binding and explicit agency ratings in their response to action choice as an experimental manipulation in a high-powered design, and by studying how temporal binding and agency ratings are related in different experimental conditions. Furthermore, we discuss the possible influence of the specific agency question regarding the participants’ ratings.

Stereotypes are abundant in everyday life – and whereas their influence on cognitive and motor performance is well documented, a causal role in pain processing is still elusive. Nevertheless, previous studies have implicated gender-related stereotype effects in pain perception as potential mediators partly accounting for sex effects on pain. An influence of stereotypes on pain seems indeed likely as pain measures have proven especially susceptible to expectancy effects such as placebo effects. However, so far empirical approaches to stereotype effects on pain are correlational rather than experimental. In this study, we aimed at documenting gender-related stereotypes on pain perception and processing by actively manipulating the participants’ awareness of common stereotypical expectations. We discovered that gender-related stereotypes can significantly modulate pain perception which was mirrored by activity levels in pain-associated brain areas.

Effect-based accounts of human action control have recently highlighted the possibility of representing one’s own actions in terms of its anticipated changes in the behavior of social interaction partners. In contrast to action effects that pertain to the agent’s body or the agent’s physical environment, social action effects have been proposed to come with peculiarities inherent to their social nature. Here we revisit the currently most prominent demonstration of such a peculiarity: the role of eye-contact for action-effect learning in social contexts (Sato & Itakura, 2013). In contrast to the previous demonstration of action-effect learning, a conceptual and a direct replication both yielded evidence for the absence of action-effect learning in the proposed design irrespective of eye-contact. Bayesian statistics supported this claim by demonstrating evidence in favor of the null hypothesis of no effect. These results suggest a limited generalizability of the original findings, for example, due to limitations that are inherent in the proposed study design or due to cultural differences.

Deliberate rule violations have typically been addressed from a motivational perspective that asked whether or not agents decide to violate rules based on contextual factors and moral considerations. Here we complement motivational approaches by providing a cognitive perspective on the processes that operate during the act of committing an unsolicited rule violation. Participants were tested in a task that allowed for violating traffic rules by exploiting forbidden shortcuts in a virtual city maze. Results yielded evidence for sustained cognitive conflict that affected performance from right before a violation throughout actually committing the violation. These findings open up a new theoretical perspective on violation behavior that focuses on processes occurring right at the moment a rule violation takes place.

Responding in the presence of stimuli leads to an integration of stimulus features and response features into event files, which can later be retrieved to assist action control. This integration mechanism is not limited to target stimuli, but can also include distractors (distractor-response binding). A recurring research question is which factors determine whether or not distractors are integrated. One suggested candidate factor is target-distractor congruency: distractor-response binding effects were reported to be stronger for congruent than for incongruent target-distractor pairs. Here, we discuss a general problem with including the factor congruency in typical analyses used to study distractor-based binding effects. Integrating this factor leads to a confound that may explain any differences between distractor-response binding effects of congruent and incongruent distractors with a simple congruency effect. Simulation data confirmed this argument. We propose to interpret previous data cautiously and discuss potential avenues to circumvent this problem in the future.

Ideomotor accounts to human action control posit that human agents represent actions in terms of their perceivable consequences; selecting, planning, and initiating a voluntary action is thus assumed to be mediated by action-effect anticipations. Corresponding empirical investigations have often employed arbitrary effects in the agent’s environment to study action-effect learning and effect-based action control. This strategy has provided accumulating evidence in support of ideomotor mechanisms but the widespread focus on environment-related action effects has also created misperceptions of what ideomotor accounts aim to explain. Moreover, this strategy also has given rise to misunderstandings of critical epistemological limitations, especially regarding the theoretical relevance of negative results in common experimental paradigms. These recent developments call for a theoretical clarification of the concept of action effects. I propose that many misunderstandings can be resolved by embracing the theoretical role of body-related as compared to environment-related actions effects. I show how the concept of such effects may inform current debates and how this focus can guide future research related to ideomotor action control, with a main challenge being the derivation of testable and falsifiable theories from the ideomotor framework.

Telling a consistent lie across multiple occasions poses severe demands on memory. Two cognitive mechanisms aid with overcoming this difficulty: Associations between a question and its corresponding response and associations between a question and its previous intentional context (in this case: honest vs. dishonest responding). Here, we assessed whether intentional contexts such as an honest versus dishonest mindset modulate the retrieval of stimulus-response (S-R) associations. In an item-specific priming paradigm, participants classified stimuli either honestly or dishonestly during a prime and a later probe. The results of three experiments yielded automatic retrieval of the previously primed motor responses (for both honest and dishonest responses) only when the intentional context repeated but not when it switched. These findings indicate interdependent associations between a stimulus, its intentional context, and the corresponding response, allowing for flexible, context-specific retrieval. Thus, humans benefit from prior learning history without incurring costs when the intentional context changes. This finding implies top-down control over the retrieval of S-R associations and provides new insights into the mechanisms of associative learning.

Responding to a stimulus leads to the integration of the stimulus, the response, and any sensory effect triggered by the response in a mental representation that has been called “event-file” or “instance”. Most theoretical models assume that event files are composed of sets of binary bindings between individual stimulus, response, and effect features. Repeating any of the integrated features on a subsequent occasion would then retrieve the entire episode. However, previous studies mainly focused on either stimulus-response (SR) binding or re-sponse-effect (RE) binding while not assessing S-R-E episodes in their entirety. Here we ana-lyzed for the first time bindings within entire action episodes including stimulus, response and effect. We found clear evidence for SR- and RE-binding, but no indication of integration be-tween stimulus and effect. We conclude that representations of actions are structured accord-ing to the current task, possibly providing a base for learning mechanisms to draw on.

Sensory attenuation of self-produced, compared to physically identical but externally produced events is a classical finding in research on perception in action. The most prominent model to explain this effect draws on an internal forward model generating predictions about action outcomes, efference copies, during action planning and initiation. Even though this finding has a long tradition in psychology and neuroscience, several studies have highlighted methodological limitations which open the door for alternative explanations of sensory attenuation effects, most notably in terms of temporal prediction. Here we present an experimental design which carefully controls for this confounding factor. Crucially, we observed the auditory N1 component of the event-related potential to be attenuated for self-generated tones as compared to externally generated tones even when a predictive cue (a bar that is continuously filling up) allows for identical temporal predictability of both events. These findings suggest that voluntary actions do indeed involve a unique, predictive component, affecting the perceptual processing of ensuing events.

Conduct disorder is characterized by both habitual aggression as well as non-aggressive rule-breaking behavior. While a large body of research has focused on aggressive behavior to date, the subtype of non-aggressive rule-breaking behavior is poorly understood. The current study represents a first attempt to directly assess decision biases toward rule-breaking behavior, their motivational salience, and the association with interpersonal factors in conduct disorder. Participants (n=20 children with conduct disorder and n=20 healthy controls) played a video game with the goal to deliver a hot pizza by bicycle to a marked location on a two-dimensional city map. In each trial, participants decided whether to use the regular route (streets) or opt for a potential shortcut that was either permitted (bicycle lane) or prohibited (park). The efficiency of the shortcut was parametrically varied to assess individual decision functions. Consistent with our hypotheses, group differences emerged only when taking a shortcut represented a rule-violation (park condition), with the conduct disorder group committing significantly more rule-violations than controls. Furthermore, conduct disorder children showed a substantial frequency of rule-violations even in the absence of shortcut-related gains, indicating a pronounced insensitivity towards sanctions. Importantly, this tendency was associated with self-reported impulsivity and rule-violations in real life.

Recent research has suggested that sequential changes in the prospect of performance-contingent rewards may influence the balance between cognitive flexibility and stability: whereas constant high reward prospect seems to promote cognitive stability, increasing reward prospect has been shown to promote flexible behavior in voluntary task switching paradigms. Previous studies, however, confounded cognitive flexibility regarding voluntary task choices with control processes during task execution. We present five experiments to dissociate these two processes by means of a double registration procedure, in which task choice is registered prior to task execution. The data yielded clear evidence for reward-driven modulation of the flexibility-stability balance already at the level of task choices, with higher voluntary switch rates when reward prospect increased as compared to situations in which reward prospect remained high. This effect was further modulated by the specific type of registration procedure, suggesting that only deliberate task choices are affected by the reward sequence. These results thus confirm that the prospect of performance-contingent reward can indeed promote either cognitive stability or flexibility depending on the immediate reward history.

Cognitive theories of dishonesty revolve around an automatic activation of honest response tendencies, which is assumed to impair response selection for the intended dishonest response. Clear-cut evidence for the claim is still limited, however. We therefore present a novel approach to dishonest responding that takes advantage of psychological refractory period (PRP) methodology. Four experiments yielded evidence supporting the assumption of prolonged response selection during dishonest responding. Moreover, they also showed differences in early response activation and they revealed additional downstream consequences of this behavior that are currently not sufficiently covered by common theoretical models. Notably, these downstream consequences included increased monitoring relative to honest behavior. Our results thus provide an extensive coverage of the cognitive architecture of dishonest responses, informing current theorizing while simultaneously grounding the assumed processes in the framework of sensorimotor stage models of information processing.

Rule violations have usually been studied from a third-person perspective, identifying situational factors that render violations more or less likely. A first-person perspective of the agent that actively violates the rules, on the other hand, is only just beginning to emerge. Here we show that committing a rule violation sensitizes towards subsequent negative stimuli as well as subsequent authority-related stimuli. In a Prime-Probe design, we used an instructed rule violation task as the Prime and a word categorization task as the Probe. Also, we employed a control condition that used a rule inversion task as the Prime (instead of rule violations). Probe targets were categorized faster after a violation relative to after a rule-based response if they related to either, negative valence, or authority. Inversions, however, primed only negative stimuli and did not accelerate the categorization of authority-related stimuli. A heightened sensitivity towards authority-related targets thus seems to be specific to rule violations. A control experiment showed that these effects cannot be explained in terms of semantic priming. Therefore, we propose that rule violations necessarily activate authority-related representations that make rule violations qualitatively different from simple rule inversions.

Violating social rules comes with cognitive conflict for the rule-breaker. Here we probed for means to reduce the behavioral effects of this conflict by studying the combined impact of recency and frequency of rule violations. We found that violating a rule facilitated the initiation of a subsequent rule violation, while notable costs relative to rule-based responding remained in measures of response execution. Such costs during response execution vanished, however, when frequency and recency of rule violation worked in concert. That is: It is possible to overcome the costs of rule violation when (a) having violated this particular rule frequently and (b) having violated this particular rule very recently. Moreover, we demonstrate that recent rule violations reduce costs of cognitive conflict in an unrelated interference task (Simon task). Based on these findings, we present a revised model on the cognitive processes underlying deliberate rule violations.

We often ask other people to carry out actions for us in order to reach our goals. However, these commanded actions may sometimes go awry and goal attainment is hindered by errors of the following person. Here we investigated how the commanding person processes these errors of their follower. Because such errors indicate that the original goal of the command is not met, error processing for these actions should be enhanced compared to passively observing another person’s actions. Participants thus either commanded another agent to perform one of four keypress responses or they passively observed the agent responding. The agent could respond correctly or commit an error in either case. We compared error processing of commanded and passively observed actions using observation-related post-error slowing (oPES) as a behavioral marker and observed-error-related negativity (oN_E/oERN) and observed-error positivity (oP_E) as electrophysiological markers. Whereas error processing, as measured via the oERN, was similarly pronounced for commanded and observed actions, commanded actions gave rise to stronger oPES and a stronger oP_E. These results suggest that enhanced monitoring is an automatic by-product of commanding another person’s actions.

According to famous physicist Niels Bohr, gunfights at high noon in Western movies do not only captivate the cinema audience, but they also provide an accurate illustration of a psychophysical law. He suggested that willed actions come with slower movement execution than reactions and therefore, a film’s hero is able to get the upper hand even though the villain normally draws first. A corresponding “Gunslinger effect” has been substantiated by empirical studies. Because these studies used a markedly competitive setting, however, it is currently unclear whether the Gunslinger effect indeed reflects structural differences between willed actions and reactive movements, or whether it is a by-product of the competitive setting. To obtain bullet-proof evidence for a true reactive advantage, we investigated willed and reactive movements during a cooperative interaction of two participants. A pronounced reactive advantage emerged, indicating that indeed two independent systems control willed and reactive movements.

We argue that making accept/reject decisions on scientific hypotheses, including a recent call for changing the canonical alpha level from p = .05 to .005, is deleterious for the finding of new discoveries and the progress of science. Given that blanket and variable alpha levels both are problematic, it is sensible to dispense with significance testing altogether. There are alternatives that address study design and sample size much more directly than significance testing does; but none of the statistical tools should be taken as the new magic method giving clear-cut mechanical answers. Inference should not be based on single studies at all, but on cumulative evidence from multiple independent studies. When evaluating the strength of the evidence, we should consider, for example, auxiliary assumptions, the strength of the experimental design, and implications for applications. To boil all this down to a binary decision based on a p-value threshold of .05, .01, .005, or anything else, is not acceptable.

Anticipated action effects have been shown to govern action selection and initiation, as described in ideomotor theory, and they have also been demonstrated to determine crosstalk between different tasks in multitasking studies. Such effect-based crosstalk was observed not only in a forward manner (with a first task influencing performance in a following second task) but also in a backward manner (the second task influencing the preceding first task), suggesting that action effect codes can become activated prior to a capacity-limited processing stage often denoted as response selection. The process of effect-based response production, by contrast, has been proposed to be capacity-limited. These observations jointly suggest that effect code activation can occur independently of effect-based response production, though this theoretical implication has not been tested directly at present. We tested this hypothesis by employing a dual-task set-up in which we manipulated the ease of effect-based response production (via response-effect compatibility) in an experimental design that allows for observing forward and backward crosstalk. We observed robust crosstalk effects and response-effect compatibility effects alike, but no interaction between both effects. These results indicate that effect activation can occur in parallel for several tasks, independently of effect-based response production, which is confined to one task at a time.

Sensory consequences of an agent’s actions are perceived less intensely than sensory stimuli that are not caused (and thus not predicted) by the observer. This effect of sensory attenuation has been discussed as a key principle of perception, potentially mediating various crucial functions such as agency and the discrimination of self-caused sensory stimulation from stimuli caused by external factors. Precise models describe the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon across a variety of modalities, especially the auditory, tactile, and visual domain. Despite these strong claims, empirical evidence for sensory attenuation in the visual domain is surprisingly sparse and ambiguous. In the present article, we therefore aim to clarify the role of sensory attenuation for learned visual action effects. To this end, we present a comprehensive replication effort including three separate, high-powered experiments on sensory attenuation in the visual domain with one direct and two pre-registered, conceptual replication attempts of an influential study on this topic (Cardoso-Leite et al., 2010). Signal detection analyses were targeted to distinguish between true visual sensitivity and response bias. Contrary to previous assumptions and despite high statistical power, however, we found no evidence for sensory attenuation of learned visual action effects. Bayesian analyses further supported the null hypothesis of no effect, thus constraining theories that promote sensory attenuation as an immediate and necessary consequence of voluntary actions.

Patient studies provide insights into mechanisms underlying diseases and thus represent a cornerstone of clinical research. In this study, we report evidence that differences between patients and controls might partly be based on expectations generated by the patients’ knowledge of being invited and treated as a patient: the Being a Patient effect (BP effect). This finding extends previous neuropsychological reports on diagnosis threat. Participants with mild allergies were addressed either as patients or control subjects in a clinical study. We measured the impact of this group labeling and corresponding instructions on pain perception and cognitive performance. Our results provide evidence that the BP effect can indeed affect physiological and cognitive measures in clinical settings. Importantly, these effects can lead to systematic overestimation of genuine disease effects and should be taken into account when disease effects are investigated. Finally, we propose strategies to avoid or minimize this critical confound.

The sense of agency is a pervasive phenomenon that accompanies conscious acting and extends to the consequences of one´s actions in the environment. Subjective feelings of agency are typically explained in terms of predictive processes, based on internal forward models inherent to the sensorimotor system, and postdictive processes, i.e., explicit, retrospective judgments by the agent. Only recently, research has begun to elucidate the link between sense of agency and more basic processes of human action control. The present study was conducted in this spirit and explored the relation between short-term action-effect binding and explicit agency judgments. We found evidence for such a link in that the participants’ short-term action-effect binding predicted subsequent agency ratings. This offers a new perspective on the sense of agency, providing an additional mechanism (together with predictive and postdictive processes) that may underlie its formation.

The late 18th century was a remarkable period for psychology. This was especially true for the Prince-Bishopric of Münster, Germany, where a new era dawned with an extensive political, economic, and educational reform which would ultimately lead to the establishment of psychology as an independent discipline at the newly founded University of Münster. But were these developments groundbreaking enough to advocate for pre-dating the beginnings of scientific psychology?

Our actions affect the behavior of other people in predictable ways. In the present paper we describe a theoretical framework for action control in social contexts which we call sociomotor action control. This framework addresses how human agents plan and initiate movements that trigger responses from other people, and we propose that humans represent and control such actions literally in terms of the body movements they consistently evoke at observers. We review evidence for this approach and discuss commonalities and differences to related fields such as joint action, intention understanding, imitation, and interpersonal power. The sociomotor framework highlights a range of open questions pertaining to how representations of other persons’ actions are linked to own motor activity, how specifically they contribute to action initiation, and how they affect the way we perceive the actions of others.

Computer games have been proposed as effective tools for cognitive enhancement. Especially first-person shooter (FPS) games have been found to yield a range of positive effects, and these positive effects also apply to the domain of executive functioning. Only a particular area of executive functioning has been shown to resist training via FPS games, and this area is task-switching performance. Here we tested whether games of a different genre, real-time strategy (RTS) games, offer a more promising approach to improve task-switching performance, because RTS games capitalize on precisely this behavior. A high-powered, quasi-experimental comparison of RTS and FPS players indicated reliable costs for task-switching across both player groups – with similar performance on multiple indicators, comprising switch costs, mixing costs, voluntary switch rates, and psychological refractory period effects. Performance of both groups further did not exceed the performance of a control group of Chess and Go players. These results corroborate previous findings on the robustness of cognitive costs of task-switching. At the same time our results also suggest that the precise characteristics of different computer games might not be critical in determining potential training effects.

Nurturing behavior may be critically influenced by the interplay of different hormones. The neuropeptide oxytocin is known to promote maternal behavior and its reduction has been associated with postpartum depression risk and child neglect. Contrariwise, the observed decrease in testosterone level during early parenthood may benefit caretaking behavior, whereas increased testosterone may reduce attention to infants. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the interactive influence of testosterone and oxytocin on selective attention to and neural processing of the baby schema (BS). 57 nulliparous women performed a target detection task with human faces with varying degree of BS following double-blinded placebo-controlled oxytocin administration in a between-subjects design. Our results support the idea that oxytocin enhances attention to the BS. Oxytocin had a positive effect on activation of the inferior frontal junction during identification of infant targets with a high degree of BS that were presented among adult distractors. Further, activation of the putamen was positively correlated with selective attention to the BS, but only in women with high endogenous testosterone who received oxytocin. These findings provide initial evidence for the neural mechanism by which oxytocin may counteract the negative effects of testosterone in the modulation of nurturing behavior.

Giving a dishonest response to a question entails cognitive conflict due to an initial activation of the truthful response. Following conflict monitoring theory, dishonest responding could therefore elicit transient and sustained control adaptation processes to mitigate such conflict, and the current experiments take on the scope and specifity of such conflict adaptation in dishonesty. Transient adaptation reduces differences between honest and dishonest responding following a recent dishonest response. Sustained adaptation has a similar behavioral signature but is driven by the overall frequency of dishonest responding. Both types of adaptation to recent and frequent dishonest responses have been separately documented, leaving open whether control processes in dishonest responding can flexibly adapt to transient and sustained conflict signals of dishonest and other actions. This was the goal of the present experiments which studied (dis)honest responding to autobiographical yes/no questions. Experiment 1 showed robust transient adaptation to recent dishonest responses whereas sustained control adaptation failed to exert an influence on behavior. It further revealed that transient effects may create a spurious impression of sustained adaptation in typical experimental settings. Experiments 2 and 3 examined whether dishonest responding can profit from transient and sustained adaption processes triggered by other behavioral conflicts. This was clearly not the case: Dishonest responding adapted markedly to recent (dis)honest responses but not to any context of other conflicts. These findings indicate that control adaptation in dishonest responding is strong but surprisingly focused and they point to a potential trade-off between transient and sustained adaptation.

Actions of others automatically prime similar responses in an agent’s behavioural repertoire. As a consequence, perceived or anticipated imitation facilitates own action control and, at the same time, imitation boosts social affiliation and rapport with others. It has previously been suggested that basic mechanisms of associative learning can account for behavioural effects of imitation whereas a possible role of associative learning for affiliative processes is poorly understood at present. Therefore, this study examined whether contingency and contiguity, the principles of associative learning, affect also the social effects of imitation. Two experiments yielded evidence in favour of this hypothesis by showing more social affiliation in conditions with high contingency (as compared to low contingency) and in conditions of high contiguity (compared to low contiguity).

Sensory stimuli resulting from one's own actions are perceptually attenuated compared to identical but externally produced stimuli. This may enable the organism to discriminate between self-produced events and externally produced events, suggesting a strong link between sensory attenuation and a subjective sense of agency. To investigate this supposed link, we compared the influence of filled and unfilled action-effect delays on both, judgements of agency for self-produced sounds and attenuation of the event-related potential (ERP). In line with previous findings, judgments of agency differed between both delay conditions with higher ratings for filled than for unfilled delays. Sensory attenuation, however, was not influenced by filling the delay. These findings indicate a partial dissociation of the two phenomena.

Humans typically act to cause effects in their environment, but at times they also voluntarily omit an action to cause a predictable effect. These effects may become bound to the causing non-actions, just as actions and their effects can become associated. In three experiments, we provide a critical re-assessment of previous reports of non-action effect binding. Following this work, participants completed an acquisition phase to associate actions and non-actions with particular effects. In a subsequent test phase, the former effects were presented as stimuli and participants were allowed to choose an action or non-action freely as a response. Binding should lead to more effect-consistent choices than chance would predict. Previous studies, however, did not control for deliberate strategies of participants that might inflate the consistency bias and, also, did not address overall preferences for either acting or non-acting, which might introduce additional artifacts. We show that these confounds have a strong impact in common experimental designs and introduce ways to mitigate these effects. This improved assessment still corroborated evidence of binding between non-actions and their effects.

Research on stimulus-response (S-R) associations as the basis of behavioral automaticity has a long history. Traditionally, it was assumed that S-R associations are formed as a consequence of the (repeated) co-occurrence of stimulus and response, that is, when participants act upon stimuli. Here, we demonstrate that S-R associations can also be established in the absence of action. In an item-specific priming paradigm, participants either classified everyday objects by performing a left or right key press (task-set execution) or they were verbally presented with information regarding an object´s class and associated action while they passively viewed the object (verbal coding). Both S-R associations created by task-set execution and by verbal coding led to the later retrieval of both the Stimulus-Action (S-A) component and the Stimulus-Classification (S-C) component of S-R associations. Furthermore, our data indicate that both associations created by execution and by verbal coding are temporally stable and rather resilient against overwriting. The automaticity of S-R associations formed in the absence of action reveals the striking adaptability of human action control.

Motor actions are facilitated if they are foreseeably being imitated rather than counter-imitated by social partners. Such beneficial effects of anticipated imitation have been explained in terms of compatibility between own actions and their anticipated consequences. Previous demonstrations of these effects might alternatively be explained by consistently faster partner responses for imitative than for non-imitative actions, however. This study contrasts both explanations by using virtual co-actors to disentangle the contributions of anticipated action-effect compatibility and anticipated action-effect delay. The data of two experiments support previous theoretical assumptions by showing that the effects of anticipated imitation are indeed driven by compatibility rather than delay.

When observing another agent performing simple actions, these actions are systematically remembered as one’s own after a brief period of time. Such “observation inflation” has been documented as a robust phenomenon in studies in which participants passively observed videotaped actions. Whether observation inflation also holds for direct, face-to-face interactions is an open question that we addressed in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants commanded the experimenter to carry out certain actions, and they indeed reported false memories of self-performance in a later memory test. The effect size of this inflation effect was similar to passive observation as confirmed by Experiment 2. These findings suggest that observation inflation might affect action memory in a broad range of real-world interactions.

The feeling of being watched has several well-documented consequences, from social facilitation to the induction of pro-social behavior. Even though the effects of being watched have long been in the focus of scientific interest, it remains unclear which features determine the actual subjective feeling of being watched. We report two experiments to approach this question. Participants were confronted with pictures showing the faces of different creatures while imagining being in an embarrassing situation. Participants rated for each creature in each situation how strongly they felt watched and how much ability they ascribed to the creature to reflect on the situation. A between-experiment manipulation of how much ability was ascribed to a particular creature further probed for a causal relation between the two variables. Results confirmed that the creature’s ascribed ability to reflect on the situation is a key component that determines the feeling of being watched in humans.

Classic findings on conformity and obedience document a strong and automatic drive of human agents to follow any type of rule or social norm. At the same time, most individuals tend to violate rules on occasion, and such deliberate rule violations have recently been shown to yield cognitive conflict for the rule-breaker. These findings indicate persistent difficulty to suppress the rule representation, even though rule violations were studied in a controlled experimental setting with neither gains nor possible sanctions for violators. In the current study, we validate these findings by showing that convicted criminals, i.e., individuals with a history of habitual and severe forms of rule-violations, can free themselves from such cognitive conflict in a similarly controlled laboratory task. These findings support a novel view that aims at understanding rule violations from the perspective of the violating agent rather than from the outside observer.

While ideomotor approaches to action control emphasize the importance of sensory action effects for action selection, motivational approaches emphasize the role of affective action effects. We used a game-like experimental setup to directly compare the role of sensory and affective action effects in selecting and performing reaching actions in forced- and free-choice tasks. The two kinds of action effects did not interact. Action selection and execution in the forced-choice task was strongly impacted by the spatial compatibility between actions and expected sensory action effects, while the free-choice task was hardly affected. In contrast, action execution, but not selection, in both tasks was strongly impacted by the spatial compatibility between actions and highly-valued action effects. This pattern suggests that sensory and affective action effects serve different purposes: the former seem to dominate rule-based action selection while the latter might serve to reduce remaining action uncertainty.

Dishonest responding is an important part of the behavioral repertoire and perfectly integrated in communication and daily actions. Previous research thus aimed at uncovering the cognitive mechanisms underlying dishonest responding by studying its immediate behavioral effects. A comprehensive account of the aftereffects of this type of behavior has not been presented to date, however. Based on methods and theories from research on task switching, we therefore explored the notion of honest and dishonest responding as two distinct intentional sets. In four experiments, participants responded either honestly or dishonestly to simple yes/no questions. Crucially, robust switch costs were found between honest and dishonest responding when questions succeeded promptly (Exp. 1) but also when an unrelated task intervened between questions (Exp. 2). Surprisingly, responding dishonestly to a question also affected responses in the subsequent intervening task in terms of a more liberal response criterion. Time to prepare for the upcoming intentional set further induced asymmetrical switch costs (Exp. 3). Finally, a novel control condition (Exp. 4) allowed us to pinpoint most of the observed effects to negation processing as an inherent mechanism of dishonesty. The experiments shed new light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying dishonesty by providing strong support for the concept of distinct mental sets for honest and dishonest responding. The experiments further reveal that these mental sets are notably stable and are not disturbed by intervening task performance. . The observed aftereffects of dishonest responding might also provide a potent extension to applied protocols for lie detection.

The cognitive processes underlying dishonesty, especially the inhibition of automatic honest response tendencies, are reflected in response times and other behavioral measures. Here we suggest that explicit false alibis might have a considerable impact on these cognitive operations. We tested this hypothesis in a controlled experimental setup. Participants first performed several tasks in a pre-experimental mission (akin to common mock crime procedures) and received a false alibi afterward. The false alibi stated alternative actions that the participants had to pretend to have performed instead of the actually performed actions. In a computer-based inquiry, the false alibi did not only reduce, but it even reversed the typical behavioral effects of dishonesty on response initiation (Exp. 1) and response execution (Exp. 2). Follow-up investigations of response activation via distractor stimuli suggest that false alibis automatize either dishonest response retrieval, the inhibition of the honest response, or both (Exp. 3 and 4). This profound impact suggests that false alibis can override actually performed activities entirely and, thus, documents a severe limitation for cognitive approaches to lie detection.

Conflict adaptation in masked priming has recently been proposed to rely not on successful conflict resolution but rather on conflict experience (Desender, Van Opstal, & Van den Bussche 2014). We re-assessed this proposal in a direct replication and also tested a potential confound due to conflict strength. The data supported this alternative view, but also failed to replicate basic conflict adaptation effects of the original study despite considerable power.

Upcoming responses in the second of two subsequently performed tasks can speed up compatible responses in the temporally preceding first task. Two experiments extend previous demonstration of such backward compatibility to affective features: Responses to affective stimuli were faster in Task 1 when an affectively compatible response effect was anticipated for Task 2. This emotional backward compatibility effect demonstrates that representations of the affective consequences of the Task-2 response were activated before the selection of a response in Task 1 was completed. This finding is problematic for the assumption of a serial stimulus-response translation stage. It also shows that the affective consequence of a response is anticipated during, and has an impact on stimulus-response translation, which implies that action planning considers codes representing and predicting the emotional consequences of actions. Implications for the control of emotional actions are discussed.

The present study examined the developmental trajectories of motor planning and executive functioning in children. To this end, we tested 217 participants with three motor tasks, measuring anticipatory planning abilities (i.e., the bar-transport-task, the sword-rotation-task and the grasp-height-task), and three cognitive tasks, measuring executive functions (i.e., the Tower-of-Hanoi-task, the Mosaic-task, and the D2-attention-endurance-task). Children were aged between 3 and 10 years and were separated into age groups by 1-year bins, resulting in a total of eight groups of children and an additional group of adults. Results suggested (1) a positive developmental trajectory for each of the sub-tests, with better task performance as children get older; (2) that the performance in the separate tasks was not correlated across participants in the different age groups; and (3) that there was no relationship between performance in the motor tasks and in the cognitive tasks used in the present study when controlling for age. These results suggest that both, motor planning and executive functions are rather heterogeneous domains of cognitive functioning with fewer interdependencies than often suggested.

Task-irrelevant features of a stimulus can disturb performance on a given task, and this can occur for cognitive reasons such as irrelevant stimulus position, and affective reasons such as high stimulus valence. The human brain adapts to such disturbances in order to ensure successful task performance. Adaptations can occur in a transient manner in response to recent events, and they can also be sustained to account for overall probabilities of disturbances. Here, we study the mutual interplay between affective and cognitive task disturbances under conditions of sustained conflict adaptation. More precisely, we examined the trajectory of finger movements in a speeded classification task and investigated whether adaptation to a high probability of spatial disturbances transfers to the impact of affective disturbances (Experiment 1) and whether adaptation to a high probability of affective disturbances transfers to the impact of spatial disturbances (Experiment 2). Our observations point toward an asymmetric transfer from adaptation to affective onto the processing of cognitive disturbances, but not the other way around.

Most of our daily life is organized around rules and social norms. But what makes rules so special? And what if one were to break a rule intentionally? Can we simply free us from the present set of rules or do we automatically adhere to them? How do rule violations influence subsequent behavior? To investigate the effects and aftereffects of violating simple S-R rule, we conducted three experiments that investigated continuous finger tracking responses on an iPad. Our experiments show that rule violations are distinct from rule-based actions in both, response times and movement trajectories. Data not only shows differences between the two types of response (rule-based vs. violation), but also yielded an unexpected pattern of aftereffects in case of rule-violations. This allows for a first step at understanding the signature and underlying mechanisms of deliberate rule violations.

Empirical investigations of ideomotor effect anticipations have mainly used action effects in the environment. By contrast, action effects that apply to the agent’s body have rarely been put to the test in corresponding experimental paradigms. We present a series of experiments using the response-effect compatibility paradigm, in which we studied the impact of to-be-produced tactile action effects on action selection, initiation and execution. Results showed a robust and reliable impact if these tactile action effects were rendered task-relevant (Exp. 1) but not when they were task-irrelevant (Exp. 2a and 2b). We further show that anticipations of tactile action effects follow the same time-course as anticipations of environment-related effects (Exp. 3 and 4). These findings demonstrate that body-related action effects do affect action control much like environment-related effects, and therefore support the theoretical assumption of functional equivalence of any type of action effect.

Traditional research on action control focuses on the outcome of a decision process and neglects the way by which these decisions are put into action. Here, we provide direct evidence for ongoing control of motivational impulses during post-decision action execution. Using a movement task in which gain/loss stimuli either functioned as targets or distractors, we show that different phases of a movement are distinctly shaped by motivational impulses. Response initiation times revealed control costs for loss targets and distractors, and control benefits for gain targets. However, movement trajectories revealed strong attraction towards the gain distractor, in line with a hypothesized pull of approach-related stimuli, while targets and distractors associated with losses had no repulsive avoidance-related effect on movement trajectories. These results show that motivational processing of goal-relevant stimuli influences the way in which goal-directed actions are executed and highlight a prominent role of reward-related distractors in shaping movement execution.

Expectancy effects are a wide-spread phenomenon, and they come with a lasting influence on cognitive operations, from basic stimulus processing to higher cognitive functions. Their impact is often profound and behaviorally significant as evidenced by an enormous body of literature investigating the characteristics and possible processes underlying expectancy effects. The literature on this topic spans diverse fields, from clinical psychology over cognitive neuroscience, and social psychology to behavioral biology. Here, we present an emerging perspective on these diverse phenomena and show how this perspective stimulates new toeholds for investigation, provides insight in underlying mechanisms, improves awareness of methodological confounds, and can lead to a deeper understanding of the effects of expectations on a broad spectrum of cognitive processes.

As early as 1783, the almost forgotten philosopher, metaphysicist, and psychologist Ferdinand Ueberwasser (1752-1812), designated himself “Professor für empirische Psychologie und Logik”, professor of empirical psychology and logic, at the University of Münster, Germany. His position was initiated and supported by the minister and educational reformer Franz von Fürstenberg (1729-1810), who considered psychology a core scientific discipline, to be taught at each school and university. At the end of the 18th century, then, psychology seems to have been on the verge of becoming an independent academic discipline, about 100 years before Wilhelm Wundt founded the discipline’s first official laboratory. It seems surprising that Ueberwasser’s writings – including a seminal textbook on empirical psychology – have been almost entirely overlooked by most historical accounts. We focus on this important founding moment of psychological science, and on the circumstances that eventually brought this seminal development to a halt.

Cognitive conflicts and distractions by task-irrelevant information often counteract effective and goal-directed behaviors. In some cases, conflicting information can even emerge internally, thus without direct external reference, and as a result of automatic mental activations. For instance, during number processing, magnitude information automatically elicits spatial associations resembling a mental number line. This Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect can modulate cognitive-behavioral performance but is also highly flexible and context-dependent, which points towards a critical involvement of working memory functions. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), in turn, has been effective in modulating working memory-related cognitive performance. In a series of experiments, we here demonstrate that decreasing activity of the left PFC by cathodal tDCS consistently and specifically eliminates implicit cognitive conflicts based on the SNARC effect, but explicit conflicts based on visuo-spatial distraction remain unaffected. This dissociation is polarity-specific and appears unrelated to functional magnitude processing as classified by regular numerical distance effects. These data demonstrate a causal involvement of the left PFC in implicit cognitive conflicts based on the automatic activation of spatial-numerical processing. Corroborating the critical interaction of brain stimulation and neurocognitive functions, our findings suggest that distraction from goal-directed behavior by automatic activation of implicit, task-irrelevant information can be blocked by the inhibition of prefrontal activity.

Rule compliance is pivotal for the regulation of social behaviour. Still, humans deliberately violate rules at times – be it for personal reasons or for a higher good. Whereas previous research has studied the preconditions and consequences of rule violations, essentially nothing is known about the cognitive processes right at the moment a rule violation takes place. Here we show that merely labeling an action as rule violation induces a strong conflict between rule violation and compliance, as revealed by participants’ bias towards rule complying motor actions. Moreover, conflict that comes with violating a rule was much stronger than conflict that comes with following an alternative rule, even if both decisions result in the same observable behavior. These observations open a new theoretical perspective on rule violation behavior, shifting the focus toward the cognitive processes operating during the very act of rule violation.

Humans follow rules by default, and violating even simple rules induces cognitive conflict for the rule breaker. Previous studies revealed this conflict in various behavioral measures, including response times and movement trajectories. Based on these experiments, we investigated the electrophysiological signature of deliberately violating a simple stimulus-response mapping rule. Such rule violations were characterized by a delayed and attenuated P300 component when evaluating a rule-relevant stimulus, most likely reflecting increased response complexity. This parietal attenuation was followed by a frontal positivity for rule violations relative to correct response trials. Together, these results reinforce previous findings on the need to inhibit automatic S-R translation when committing a rule violation, and they point toward additional factors involved in rule violation. Candidate processes such as negative emotional responses and increased monitoring should be targeted by future investigations.

The schoRsch package aims at improving the usability of the open-source software R for researchers in psychology and related disciplines. It provides easy-to-use functions to format the results of typical tests used in psychology and related fields according to the current style guidelines of the American Psychological Association (APA). These and several other convenience functions allow for efficient data analysis and aim at expediting the workflow when reporting test results in scientific publications.

Short-term bindings between responses and events in the environment ensure efficient behavioral control. This notion holds true for two particular types of binding: Bindings between responses and response-irrelevant distractor stimuli that are present at the time of responding, and also for bindings between responses and the effects they cause. Although both types of binding have been extensively studied in the past, little is known about their interrelation. In three experiments, we analyzed both types of binding processes in a distractor-response binding design and in a response-effect binding design, which yielded two central findings. (1) Distractor-response binding and response-effect binding effects were observed not only in their native, but also in the corresponding ‘non-native’ design, and (2) a manipulation of retrieval delay affected both types of bindings in a similar way. We suggest that a general and unselective mechanism is responsible for integrating own responses with a large variety of stimuli.

Human action control is influenced by bindings between perceived stimuli and responses carried out in their presence. Notably, responses given to a target stimulus can also be integrated with additional response irrelevant distractor stimuli that accompany the target (distractor-response binding). Subsequently re-encountering such a distractor then retrieves the associated response. Although a large body of evidence supports the existence of this effect, the specific structure of distractor-response bindings is still unclear. Here we test the predictions derived from two possible assumptions about the structure of bindings between distractors and responses. According to a configural approach, the entire distractor-object is integrated with a response, and only upon repetition of the entire distractor-object the associated response would be retrieved. According to an elemental approach, one would predict integration of individual distractor features with the response and retrieval due to the repetition of an individual distractor feature. Four experiments indicate that both, configural and elemental bindings exist and specify boundary conditions for each type of binding. These findings provide detailed insights into the architecture of bindings between response-irrelevant stimuli and actions and thus allow for specifying how distractor stimuli influence human behavior.

The temporal interval between an action and its ensuing effect is perceptually compressed. Specifically, the perceived onset of actions is shifted towards their effects in time and, vice versa, the perceived onset of effects is shifted towards their causing actions. In four experiments, we report evidence showing that action-effect binding also occurs in the spatial domain. Participants controlled the location of a visual stimulus by performing stylus movements before they judged either the position of the stylus or the position of the visual stimulus. The results yielded spatial binding between the perceived stylus position and the perceived stimulus position when the stimulus was under full control of the hand movement compared to control conditions without direct control.

Ample evidence suggests that motor actions are generated by mentally recollecting their sensory consequences, i.e., via effect anticipations. There is less evidence, though, on the capacity-limitations that such effect anticipations suffer from. In the present paper we aim to overcome shortcomings of previous research on this issue by extending the set of empirical indicators of effect-anticipations and by using trial-wise instead of block-wise manipulations. In four experiments using the locus of slack- and the effect propagation-logic, we found conclusive evidence for effect anticipation taking place in the capacity-limited central bottleneck. These findings extend previous research suggesting an overlap of a “response selection” process as assumed in traditional stage theory and effect anticipation processes as assumed in effect-based ideomotor models of action control.

Converging evidence from controlled experiments suggests that the mere processing of a number and its attributes such as value or parity might affect free choice decisions between different actions. For example the Spatial Numerical Associations of Response Codes (SNARC) effect indicates the magnitude of a digit to be associated with a spatial representation and might therefore affect spatial response choices (i.e., decisions between a “left” and a “right” option). At the same time, other (linguistic) features of a number such as parity are embedded into space and might likewise prime left or right responses through feature words (odd or even, respectively; MARC effect). In this experiment we aimed at documenting such influences in a natural setting. We therefore assessed number-space and parity-space association effects by exposing participants to a fair distribution task in a card playing scenario. Participants drew cards, read out loud their number values, and announced their response choice, i.e., dealing it to a left versus right player, indicated by Playmobil characters. Not only did participants prefer to deal more cards to the right player, the card’s digits also affected29 response choices and led to a slightly but systematically unfair distribution, supported by a regular SNARC effect and counteracted by a reversed MARC effect. The experiment demonstrates the impact of SNARC- and MARC-like biases in free choice behavior through verbal and visual numerical information processing even in a setting with high external validity.

The present work investigated functional characteristics of control adjustments in intermodal sensory processing. Subjects performed an interference task that involved simultaneously presented visual and auditory stimuli which were either congruent or incongruent with respect to their response mappings. In two experiments, “trial-by-trial” sequential congruency effects were analysed for specific conditions that allowed ruling out “non-executive” contributions of stimulus or response priming to the respective RT fluctuations. In Experiment 1, conflict adaptation was observed in an oddball condition in which interference emanates from a task-irrelevant and response-neutral low-frequency stimulus. This finding characterizes intermodal control adjustments to be based – at least partly – on increased sensory selectivity, which is able to improve performance in any kind of interference condition which shares the same or overlapping attentional requirements. In order to further specify this attentional mechanism, Experiment 2 defined analogous conflict adaptation effects in non-interference unimodal trials in which just one of the two stimulus modalities was presented. Conflict adaptation effects in unimodal trials exclusively occurred for unimodal task-switch trials but not for otherwise equivalent task repetition trials, which suggests that the observed conflict-triggered control adjustments mainly consist of increased distractor inhibition (i.e., down-regulation of task-irrelevant information), while attributing a negligible role to target amplification (i.e., enhancement of task-relevant information) in this setup. This behavioral study yields a promising operational basis for subsequent neuroimaging investigations to define brain activations and connectivities which underlie the adaptive control of attentional selection.

The response-effect compatibility (REC) paradigm provides an elegant tool to study the impact of anticipated action effects on action control. Converging evidence for such anticipative processes has mainly emerged from tasks that require simple, discrete actions, whereas tasks that require more complex, continuous actions such as wheel-rotation responses have yielded discrepant results. We propose that these discrepant results can be explained by two moderating variables that have only played a minor role in effect-based theories of human action control: (1) the degree of dimensional overlap (rather than its mere presence) and (2) directing attention towards the action effects. The results of three experiments suggest that both factors are crucial in determining the size of REC effects for continuous wheel-rotation responses: Reliable REC effects were obtained, and they were larger with high than with low dimensional overlap and when attending to the effects than when not. Thus, the study points toward important preconditions that determine whether and how effect anticipations affect complex motor actions.

Anticipations of future sensory events have the potential of priming motor actions that would typically cause these events. Such effect anticipations are generally assumed to rely on previous physical experiences of the contingency of own actions and their ensuing effects. Here we propose that merely imagined action effects may influence behaviour similarly as physically experienced action effects do. Three experiments in the response-effect compatibility paradigm show that the mere knowledge of action-effect contingencies is indeed sufficient to incorporate these effects into action control even if the effects are never experienced as causally linked to own actions. The experiments further highlight constraints for this mechanism which seems to be rather effortful and to depend on explicit intentions.

The subjective experience of controlling events in the environment alters the perception of these events. For instance, the interval between one’s own actions and their consequences is subjectively compressed – a phenomenon known as intentional binding. In two experiments, we studied intentional binding in a social setting in which actions of one agent prompted a second agent to perform another action. Participants worked in pairs and were assigned to a “leader” and a “follower” role, respectively. The leader’s key presses triggered (after a variable interval) a tone effect and this tone served as go signal for the follower to perform a keypress as well. Leaders and followers estimated the interval between the leader’s keypress and the following tone, or the interval between the tone and the follower’s keypress. The leader showed reliable intentional binding for both intervals relative to the follower’s estimates. These results indicate that human agents experience a pre-reflective sense of agency for genuinely social consequences of their actions.

How does our mind produce physical, goal-directed action of our body? For about 200 years, philosophers and psychologists hypothesized the transformation from mind to body to rely on the anticipation of an action’s sensory consequences. Whereas this hypothesis received tremendous support from behavioral experiments, the neural underpinnings of action control via such ideomotor effect anticipations are virtually unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study identified the inferior parietal cortex and the parahippocampal gyrus as key regions for this type of action control – setting the stage for a neuroscientific framework for explaining action control by ideomotor effect anticipations and thus enabling a synthesis of psychological and neuroscientific approaches to human action.

What we intend to achieve with our actions affects the way we move our body. This has been repeatedly shown for both, movement-related intentions such as grasping and turning an object, and relatively high-level intentions such as the intention to collaborate or to compete with a social partner. The impact of an intermediate level of intentions – referring to action-contingent changes in the physical environment – is far less clear, however. We present three experiments that aim at scrutinizing this level of analysis by showing how such anticipated consequences affect movement trajectories. Participants steered a virtual avatar towards portals that displaced the avatar to a different but predictable location. Even though this displacement occurred only after the movement was completed, hand movements were clearly torn toward the anticipated final location of the avatar. These results show that properties of anticipated action consequences leave a fingerprint on movement trajectories and provide an opportunity to unite previous accounts on the relation of intentions and movements with general frameworks of action planning.

Previous research suggests that motor actions are intentionally generated by recollecting their sensory consequences. Whereas this has been shown to apply to visual or auditory consequences in the environment, surprisingly little is known about the contribution of immediate, body-related consequences, such as proprioceptive and tactile reafferences. Here we report evidence for a contribution of vibrotactile reafferences to action selection by using a response-effect compatibility paradigm. More precisely, anticipating actions to cause spatially incompatible vibrations delayed responding to a small but reliable degree. Whereas this observation suggests functional equivalence of body-related and environment-related reafferences to action control, the future application of the described experimental procedure might reveal functional peculiarities of specific types of sensory consequences in action control.

Even though electroencephalography has played a prominent role for lie detection via personally relevant information, the electrophysiological signature of active lying is still elusive. We addressed this signature with two experiments in which participants helped a virtual police officer to locate a knife. Crucially, before this response, they announced whether they would lie or tell the truth about the knife’s location. This setup allowed us to study the signature of lie-telling in the absence of rare and personally significant oddball stimuli that are typically used for lie detection via electrophysiological markers, especially the P300 component. Our results indicate that active lying attenuated P300 amplitudes as well as N200 amplitudes for such non-oddball stimuli. These results support accounts that stress the increased cognitive demand of lie-telling, including the need to suppress the truthful response and to generate a lie.

When performing jointly on a task, human agents are assumed to represent their coactor’s share of this task, and research in various joint action paradigms has focused on representing the coactor’s stimulus–response assignments. Here we show that the response–effect (R–E) contingencies exploited by a coactor also affect performance, and thus might be represented as if they were used by oneself. Participants performed an R–E compatibility task, with keypresses producing spatially compatible or incompatible action effects. We did not observe any R–E compatibility effects when the task was performed in isolation (individual go–no-go). By contrast, small but reliable R–E compatibility effects emerged when the same task was performed in a joint setting. These results indicate that the knowledge of a coactor’s R–E contingencies can influence whether self-produced action effects are used for one’s own motor control.

Psychological research has documented again and again marked performance decrements whenever humans perform 2 or more tasks at the same time. In fact, the available evidence seems to suggest that any type of behavior is subject to such limitations. The present experiments employed the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm to identify a clear exception to this rule: Unconditioned reflexes do escape dual-task interference, whereas intended simple responses, so called “prepared reflexes,” do not. Beyond this empirical novelty, we discuss the findings in broader terms of human action control. In particular, we suggest that the (non)susceptibility to dual-task interference may provide a clear empirical delineation between goal-directed behavior (i.e., actions) and other, not goal-directed behavior.

Responses in the second of two subsequently performed tasks can speed up compatible responses in the temporally preceding first task. Such backward crosstalk effects (BCE) represent a challenge to the assumption of serial processing in stage models of human information processing, because they indicate that certain features of the second response have to be represented before the first response is emitted. Which of these features are actually relevant for BCEs is an open question, even though identifying these features is important for understanding the nature of parallel and serial response selection processes in dual-task performance. Motivated by effect-based models of action control, we show in three experiments that the BCE to a considerable degree reflects features of intended action effects, although features of the response proper (or response-associated kinesthetic feedback) also seem to play a role. These findings suggest that the codes of action effects (or action goals) can become activated simultaneously rather than serially, thereby creating BCEs.

This study examined the dynamic impact of self-control conflict on action execution. We reasoned that the tug-of-war between antagonistic action tendencies is not ultimately solved before movement initiation but leaks into action execution. To this end, we measured mouse trajectories to quantify the dynamic competition between initial temptations and the struggle to overcome them. Participants moved the mouse cursor from a start location to one of two targets. Each target represented gains or losses of points. Although participants earned points in the majority of the trials, they also had to make movements to the loss target in some trials to prevent an even higher loss. Two experiments found that movement trajectories in these loss trials deviate towards the tempting stimulus: The way we move reveals self-control conflicts that have not been resolved prior to action execution.

We examined whether a temporal interval between an action and its sensory effect is integrated in the cognitive action structure in a bidirectional fashion. In three experiments, participants first experienced that actions produced specific acoustic effects (high and low tones) which occurred temporally delayed after their actions. In a following test phase, the tones that were presented as action effects in the previous phase were now presented as primes for the responses that had caused them previously and, critically, also as primes for the interval that previously separated action and effects. The tones were presented as go-signals in a free-choice test and as response-imperative stimuli in a forced-choice test. In the free choice test, participants were more likely to choose responses consistent with the previous pairing, but these responses were initiated slower than responses that were inconsistent with previous action-effect learning (Experiment 1). Effect-consistent responses were also initiated slower in the speeded forced-choice test (Experiment 2). These observations suggest that retrieval of a long action-effect interval slows down response initiation. In Experiment 3, response-contingent effects were presented with a long or short delay after a response. Reaction times in both, a forced-choice and free-choice setup, were faster in the short than in the long interval condition. We conclude that temporal information about the interval between actions and effects is integrated into a cognitive action structure and is automatically retrieved during response selection.

Research on human action has extensively covered controlled and automatic processes in the transformation of stimulus information into motor action, and how conflict between both types of processes is solved. However, the question of how automatic S-R translation per se depends on top-down control states remains unanswered. The present study addressed this issue by manipulating top-down control state (instructed S-R mapping) and automatic bottom-up processing (retrieval of S-R memory traces) independently from each other. Using a color/shape task-switching paradigm, we compared cross-talk triggered by distractor stimuli, for which the instructed S-R mapping and the S-R associations compiled at the beginning of the experiment matched, with the cross-talk triggered by distractor stimuli, for which (re-)instructed mapping and compiled S-R associations did not match. We show that the latter distractors do not yield any cross-talk in RTs and even reversed cross-talk in error rates, demonstrating that automatic S-R retrieval is modulated by top-down control states.

The bimodality coefficient (BC) is a statistic to probe empirical distributions for uni- versus bimodality. Its use has become increasingly popular with rising interest in distinguishing single-process and dual-process phenomena in a wide variety of cognitive processes. However, different formulas for the BC have appeared in the literature since its first appearance in the repertoire of the SAS package. The present article identifies these discrepancies, discusses an important but undesired behavior of the BC, and offers guidelines on how to appropriately calculate the BC values with different software packages (SAS, Calc, Excel, SPSS, Matlab, R).

Three different methods for extracting coefficients of linear regression analyses are presented. The focus is on automatic and easy-to-use approaches for common statistical packages: SPSS, R, and MS Excel / Libre Office Calc. Hands-on examples are included for each analysis, followed by a brief description of how a subsequent regression coefficient analysis is performed.

Numbers and space are tightly linked – a phenomenon that is referred to as the SNARC effect (spatial-numerical association of response codes). The present study investigates how quickly and flexibly the behavioral impact of such spatial-numerical associations can be controlled. Participants performed a parity judgment task and we examined how the SNARC effect is influenced by the preceding congruency between the required response and the target number’s spatial association. Results indicate that the SNARC effect is reduced instantly after having experienced a number’s spatial association to interfere with responding. This sequential modulation indicates a pronounced flexibility of spatial-numerical associations driven by cognitive control mechanisms.

Erratum available as supplementary material (as printed in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39(6), 1913).

Voluntary actions are guided by sensory anticipations of body-related as well as environment-related action effects. Even though action effects in the environment typically resemble the action goal proper, anticipations of body-related effects can cause interference if they do not correspond to intended environment-related effects. The present study explored which specific response features, namely, the spatial location of the moving limb or its anatomical connection to the body causes such interference. Using a response-effect (R-E) compatibility design with normal and crossed hand-key mappings, we show that environment-related effects are predominantly related to spatial rather than anatomical response features, ensuring that goal-directed behavior is flexible and efficient at the same time. Furthermore, results indicate that this mechanism applies to both, free- and forced-choice actions.

Valued by statisticians, enforced by editors, and confused by many authors, standard errors (SEs) and confidence intervals (CIs) remain a controversial issue in the psychological literature. This is especially true for the proper use of CIs for within-subjects designs, even though several recent publications elaborated on possible solutions for this case. The present paper presents a short and straightforward introduction to the basic principles of CI construction, in an attempt to encourage students and researchers in cognitive psychology to use CIs in their reports and presentations. Focusing on a simple but prevalent case of statistical inference, the comparison of two sample means, we describe possible CIs for between- and within-subjects designs. In addition, we give hands-on examples of how to compute these CIs and discuss their relation to classical t-tests.

Imitation is assumed to serve crucial functions in social interaction such as empathy and learning; yet these functions only apply to the imitating observer. Here, we reveal a distinct function of imitation for the action model: Anticipating to be imitated facilitates the production of own motor actions. Specifically, anticipated motor responses of social counterparts serve as mental cues to retrieve corresponding motor commands in order to orchestrate one’s own actions.

Ideomotor theory holds that the perception or anticipatory imagination of action effects activates motor tendencies towards the action that is known to produce these effects, here referred to as ideomotor response activation (IRA). IRA presupposes that the agent has previously learned which action produces which effects, and that this learning process has created bidirectional associations between the sensory effect codes and the motor codes producing the sensory effects. Here, we refer to this process as ideomotor learning. In the presented fMRI study, we adopted a standard two-phase ideomotor learning paradigm; a mixed between/within-subjects design allowed us to assess the neural substrate of both, IRA and ideomotor learning. We replicated earlier findings of a hand asymmetry in ideomotor processing with significantly stronger IRA by left-hand than right-hand action effects. Crucially, we traced this effect back to more pronounced associative learning for action-contingent effects of the left hand compared with effects of the right hand. In this context, our findings point to the caudate nucleus and the angular gyrus as central structures of the neural network underlying ideomotor learning.

Human-computer interactions pose special demands on the motor system, especially regarding the abstract, virtual tool transformations that underlie typical mouse movements. Three experiments investigated whether such virtually tool-transformed movements are similarly resistant to irrelevant variation of a target object as skilled natural movements are. We show that such irrelevant information deteriorates performance in perceptual tasks whereas movement parameters remain unaffected, suggesting that the control of virtual tools draws on the same mechanisms as natural actions. The results are discussed in terms of their practical utility and recent findings investigating unskilled and transformed movements in the framework of the action/perception model and the integration of tools in to the body-schema.

Humans make numerous choices every day and tend to perceive these choices as free. The present study shows how simple free choices are biased by experiencing unrelated auditory information. In two experiments, participants categorized tones according to their intensity on the dimensions volume and duration on the majority of trials. On some trials, however, they were to randomly generate a number, and we found these choices to be influenced by tone intensity. Particularly, if participants were cued toward volume, loud tones clearly biased participants to generate larger numbers. For tone duration, a similar effect only emerged if spatial information was reinforced by the motor context of the task. The findings extend previous findings relating to the ATOM framework (A Theory of Magnitude) by an explicit focus on auditory magnitude processing. As such, they also constrain ATOM by showing that the connections between different magnitude dimensions vary to a considerable degree.

A commentary on Honesty requires time (and lack of justifications) by Shalvi, S., Eldar, O., & Bereby-Meyer, Y. (2012). Psychological Science, 23(10), 1264–1270. doi: 10.1177/0956797612443835.

The impact of cognitive operations on haemodynamic activity in the human brain is a cornerstone of modern cognitive neuroscience. This essay presents an early speculation about why there is increased blood flow following cognitive operations: Emil Harleß, a 19th century German physiologist, proposed that this blood flow responds to irritations caused by “the will” in order to restore homeostasis. Peculiar from a modern perspective, this speculation shows how neuroscientific concepts – and corresponding perspectives on cognitive function – have changed over the centuries

One’s own name constitutes a unique part of conscious awareness – but does this also hold true for unconscious processing? The present study shows that the own name has the power to bias a person’s actions unconsciously even in conditions that render any other name ineffective. Participants judged whether a letter string on the screen was a name or a non-word while this target stimulus was preceded by a masked prime stimulus. Crucially, the participant’s own name was among these prime stimuli and facilitated reactions to following name targets whereas the name of another, yoked participant did not. Yet, participants were not aware of any of the prime stimuli, including their own name. These results extend traditional findings on “breakthrough” phenomena of personally relevant stimuli to the domain of unconscious processing. Thus, the brain seems to possess adroit mechanisms to identify and process such stimuli even in the absence of conscious awareness.

As the empirical study of action control via ideomotor effect-anticipations continues to uncover more and more aspects of this fundamental process, it is time to look back to the 19th century roots of the theory to assess which classic ideas are supported by contemporary research. In turn, classic ideas might stimulate studies on aspects of the ideomotor mechanism that have not yet been addressed empirically. The present article is a tribute to this classical work – more precisely to the article “Der Apparat des Willens” [The Apparatus of Will], published by Emil Harleß 150 years ago. At a closer look, Harleß does not only present a concise description of the ideomotor mechanism; he also presents a wealth of intriguing ideas that deserve empirical investigation.

Human actions are guided either by endogenous action plans or by external stimuli in the environment. These two types of action control seem to be mediated by neurophysiologically and functionally distinct systems that interfere if an endogenously planned action suddenly has to be performed in response to an exogenous stimulus. In this case, the endogenous representation has to be deactivated first to give way to the exogenous system. Here we show that interference of endogenous and exogenous action control is not limited to motor-related aspects but also affects the perception of action-related stimuli. Participants associated two actions with contingent sensory effects in learning blocks. In subsequent test blocks, preparing one of these actions specifically impaired responding to the associated effect in an exogenous speeded detection task, yielding a blindness-like effect for arbitrary, learned action effects. In accordance with the Theory of Event Coding, this finding suggests that action planning influences perception even in the absence of any physical similarities between action and to-be-perceived stimuli.

Transformations of hand movements by tools such as levers or electronic input devices can invoke performance costs compared to untransformed movements. The present study investigated at which stage of information processing such tool-transformation costs arise by means of the Psychological Refractory Period paradigm. We used an inversion transformation, i.e., the movement of the operating hand was transformed into a spatially incompatible movement of a lever. As a basic tool-transformation effect, the initiation of inverted tool movements was delayed compared to non-inverted movements. Experiment 1 suggested a central (or post-central) locus of this tool transformation effect, and ruled out a (pre-central) perceptual locus. Experiments 2 and 3 confirmed the central locus and ruled out a later, motor-related stage of processing. The results show that spatially incompatible tool movements delay a capacity-limited stage of information processing, often referred to as response selection.

Using tools, such as simple levers, poses specific demands on the motor system. Two related performance decrements have been reported: The costs that arise when required tool movements and movements of the operating hands are spatially incompatible (hand-tool compatibility), and the costs that arise when relevant stimuli and tool movements are spatially incompatible (stimulus-tool compatibility). We performed two experiments to test the boundary conditions of both effects. Experiment 1 revealed a strong hand-tool compatibility effect despite visual occlusion of the hand and instructions to ignore hand movements. Experiment 2 revealed influences of stimulus-tool compatibility despite instructions to ignore the tool and to pay attention to the operating hand alone. These results suggest that lever movements of the type studied become automatically represented and constrain motor performance.

The last decades have seen a growing interest in the impact of action on perception and other concurrent cognitive processes. One particularly interesting example is that manual rotation actions facilitate mental rotation. The present study extends this research in two fundamental ways. First, Experiment 1 demonstrated that not only do manual rotations facilitate mental rotations, but that conversely, mental rotations also facilitate subsequent manual rotations. Second, Experiments 2 and 3 targeted the mechanisms underlying this interplay. Here, manual steering wheel rotations produced salient visual effects, namely the rotation of either a plane or a horizon in a visual aviation display. The rotation direction of these effects either did or did not correspond to the direction of the manual rotation itself. These experiments clearly demonstrate an impact of sensory action effects: Mental rotations facilitate manual rotations with visual effects of the same direction (as the mental rotation), irrespective of the direction of the manual rotation. These findings highlight the importance of effect anticipation in action planning. As such they support the contentions of ideomotor theory and shed new light on the cognitive source of the interplay between visual imagery and motor control.

Flexible behavior is only possible if contingencies between own actions and following environmental effects are acquired as quickly as possible; and recent findings indeed point toward an immediate formation of action-effect bindings already after a single coupling of an action and its effect. The present study explored whether these short-term bindings occur for both, stimulus- and goal-driven actions (“forced-choice actions” vs. “free-choice actions”). Two experiments confirmed that immediate action-effect bindings are formed for both types of actions and affect upcoming behavior. These findings support the view that action-effect binding is a ubiquitous phenomenon which occurs for any type of action.

Recent studies reported converging evidence for action-effect associations if participants adopted an intention-based action control mode in free choice conditions whereas no evidence for action-effect associations was found when participants adopted a stimulus-based mode in forced choice conditions. It is not yet clear, however, whether action control modes moderate acquisition or usage of action-effect associations. In the present experiment, two groups of participants underwent an acquisition phase consisting of either free or forced choice key presses that produced irrelevant but contingent effect tones. In a subsequent test phase, participants freely chose the key to press after former effect tones were presented. A reliable consistency effect resulted for both groups, i.e. participants preferred the key that produced the irrelevant tone in the preceding acquisition phase. In combination with prior findings, this consistency effect suggests that usage but not acquisition of action-effect associations depends on an intention-based action control mode.

Numerous recent studies examined the impact of video gaming on various dependent variables, including the players’ affective reactions, positive as well as detrimental cognitive effects, and real-world aggression. These target variables are typically analyzed as a function of game characteristics and player attributes – especially gender. However, findings on the uneven distribution of gaming experience between males and females on the one hand and the effect of gaming experience on several target variables on the other hand point at a possible confound when gaming experiments are analyzed with standard analysis of variance (ANOVA). The present paper uses simulated data to exemplify analysis of regression residuals (ANORES) as a potentially beneficial data analysis strategy for such data sets. As the actual impact of gaming experience on each of the various dependent variables differs, the ultimate benefits of ANORES entirely depend on the research question but it offers a powerful statistical approach to video game research whenever gaming experience is a confounding factor.

The wardrobe malfunction – an unanticipated exposure of bodily parts in the public – has become a prevailing issue in concerts, shows and other celebrity events that is reliably reported by the media. The internet as the fastest source for celebrity gossip allows measuring the impact of such wardrobe malfunctions on the public interest in a celebrity. This measurement in turn allows conclusions about intention, motivation, and internet behaviour of a wide variety of internet users. The present study exemplifies the use of an innovative non-reactive measure of active interest – the Search Volume Index – to assess the impact of a variety of internet-related phenomena, including wardrobe malfunctions. Results indicate that interest in a celebrity increases immediately after such an event and stays at a high level for about three weeks (the wardrobe plateau). This special form of celebrity gossip thus meets a constant interest of a substantial proportion of internet users.

According to ideomotor theory, voluntary actions are selected and initiated by means of anticipated action effects. Prior experiments yielded evidence for these effect anticipations with response-effect (R-E) compatibility phenomena using blocked R-E relations. Daily actions, however, typically evoke different effects depending on the situational context. In the present study, we accounted for this natural variability and investigated R-E compatibility effects by a trial-by-trial variation of R-E compatibility relations. In line with recent observations regarding ideomotor learning, R-E compatibility influenced responding only when participants responded in free choice trials assuming that participants then adopted an intention-based action control mode. In contrast, R-E compatibility had no impact when participants responded according to imperative stimuli throughout the experiment, thus when participants adopted a stimulus-based action control mode. Interestingly, once an intention-based mode was established because of free choice trials within an experimental block, we observed response compatibility effects in free as well as forced choice trials. These findings extend and refine theoretical assumptions on different action control modes in goal-directed behavior and the specific contribution of ideomotor processes to intention-based action control.

According to ideomotor theory, actions become linked to the sensory feedback they contingently produce, so that anticipating the feedback automatically evokes the action it typically results from. Numerous recent studies have provided evidence in favour of such action-effect learning but left an important issue unresolved. It remains unspecified to what extent action-effect learning is based on associating effect-representations to representations of the performed movements or to representations of the targets at which the behaviour aimed at. Two experiments were designed to clarify this issue. In an acquisition phase, par-ticipants learned the contingency between key presses and effect tones. In a following test phase, key-effect and movement-effect relations were orthogonally assessed by changing the hand-key mapping for one half of the participants. Experiment 1 showed precedence for target-effect over movement-effect learning in a forced-choice RT task. In Experiment 2, target-effect-learning was also shown to influence the outcome of response selection in a free-choice task. Altogether, the data indicate that both, movement-effect as well as target-effect associations contribute to the formation of action-effect linkages – provided that movements and targets are likewise contingently related to the effects.

Nichts erscheint uns so einfach wie unsere Wahrnehmung. Tatsächlich ist die Verarbeitung von Sinneseindrücken für unser Gehirn aber erstaunlich komplex. Es zerlegt unsere Sinneseindrücke zunächst in kleine Einzelmerkmale. Diese Einzelmerkmale müssen dann wie ein Puzzle zusammengesetzt werden. Aber woher „weiß“ unser Gehirn, welche Merkmale zu welchem Objekt, zu welcher Person, zu welchem Umweltereignis gehören?

Before criticizing others, it is useful to walk a mile in their shoes. “Because that way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes”. Davood Gozli has walked quite a few miles in the shoes of an experimental psychologist in his career. After distancing himself from the field, however, he is now indeed a mile away and his “Experimental Psychology and Human Agency” presents an impressive take on contemporary experimental psychology by adopting the decidedly detached perspective of a pure critic.

German

Die Kognitionspsychologische Grundlagenforschung zur Handlungskontrolle hat inzwischen eine große Zahl sehr spezifischer Aspekte von kontrollierten Handlungen in diversen Experimentalparadigmen isoliert und beleuchtet, sodass der gegenwärtige Forschungsstand durch eine unübersehbare Flut unverbundener Phänomene und ausgeprägt paradigmatischer Modellvorstellungen gekennzeichnet ist. In dem hier vorgeschlagenen Rahmenmodell (Binding and Retrieval in Action Control, BRAC) werden die für Handlungen wichtigsten Prozesse Paradigmen-übergreifend beschrieben, systematisch eingeordnet und in ein Rahmenmodell transferiert, bei dem Merkmalsintegration und Merkmalsabruf als wichtige Mechanismen der Handlungssteuerung dienen. Wir zeigen exemplarisch auf, wie das Modell etablierte, aber bislang unabhängig voneinander untersuchte Effekte aus Handlungs-Paradigmen mithilfe derselben Mechanismen erklärt. Dieses Modell birgt neben seinem Ordnungs- und Integrationscharakter die Möglichkeit, Effekte auch aus anderen Forschungskontexten in der Sprache des Modells zu reformulieren. Das Modell soll Wissen aus der Kognitionsforschung bzw. Allgemeinen Psychologie innovativ kondensieren und anderen Disziplinen zur Verfügung stellen.

English

Cognitive psychology research on action control investigated actions in experimental paradigms that tried to isolate specific aspects of actions. The result is an abundance of paradigm-specific results and models. Here we propose an overarching perspective summarizing the paradigm-specific results in a framework (Binding and Retrieval in Action Control; BRAC) that is mainly based on the mechanisms that emerged as important mechanisms of action control in previous research, namely binding and retrieval. We then use this approach to explain established effects from the realm of action control. The BRAC framework structures the experimental literature on action control but it can also be extended towards research areas of psychology and effects in these research areas can be re-formulated within this framework at a micro-process level. The BRAC framework condenses the results on action control from cognitive psychology and allows transfer of this condensed knowledge to other areas of psychology.

Begriffe wie „kognitiv“ oder „Kognition“ sind heutzutage aus dem Wortschatz der wissenschaftlichen Psychologie und vieler angrenzender Bereiche nicht mehr wegzudenken und auch die Alltagssprache hat das Wort inzwischen erobert, etwa in Form von „kognitiven Trainings“, „kognitivem Altern“ oder „kognitiven Therapien“.

Begriffe wie „kognitiv“ oder „Kognition“ sind heutzutage aus dem Wortschatz der wissenschaftlichen Psychologie und vieler angrenzender Bereiche nicht mehr wegzudenken und auch die Alltagssprache hat das Wort inzwischen erobert, etwa in Form von „kognitiven Trainings“, „kognitivem Altern“ oder „kognitiven Therapien“.

Over the last decade, experimental findings from a variety of paradigms and fields have given rise to a renaissance of the Ideomotor Approach - an elegant theory of voluntary action that was first described by 19th century philosophers. This classical theory as well as its modern extensions put special emphasis on the role of action effects and anticipative processes for action control. While there is growing consensus on the importance of these phenomena, we are just now beginning to understand the integrative power of the ideomotor approach in a variety of fields such as perception and action, imitation, tool-use, and cognitive neuroscience. This Research Topic is devoted to such emerging perspectives on ideomotor action - ranging from neural correlates up to social behaviour.

Im Alltag ist es die selbstverständlichste aller Selbstverständlichkeiten: Wenn ich in den Kühlschrank greifen möchte um einen Joghurt herauszuholen, den Briefkasten nach Post durchsuchen will oder auf der Computertastatur herumdrücke – meine Hände machen meistens das, was ich von ihnen erwarte. Und bis auf seltene Ausnahmen erreiche ich zumindest in so einfachen Fällen auch das was ich wollte. Aber wie funktioniert das eigentlich? Woher wissen meine Hände was sie tun sollen? Wie wird mein subjektives Ziel in tatsächliches Verhalten übersetzt?

Common knowledge holds that it takes two to tango. The same goes for imitation, which involves (at least) a model and an imitator. Many empirical studies on imitation have focused on assessing the imitator’s behavior as a function of model characteristics, thus construing the models’ behavior as stimulus, and the imitators’ behavior as response. This is particularly true for research on automatic imitation or motor priming. Yet, the same imitation scenario can also be assessed as an action-effect scenario from the perspective of the model. This perspective asks how the models’ actions are shaped by the foreseeable behavior of imitators, which from the perspective of the model can be construed as predictable action effects. This chapter approaches anticipated imitation through the theoretical lens of ideomotor action control, which offers a mechanistic framework to accommodate bidirectional influences from model to imitator and vice versa. We further discuss how embracing an ideomotor view on imitation highlights close connections of imitation to other aspects of human action control. This includes actions that aim at affecting the inanimate environment as well as actions that aim at evoking non-imitative responses of social interaction partners. Evidence from experimental studies supports these theoretical ideas by adapting classical response-effect compatibility paradigms to imitative scenarios and other social interactions, suggesting that the social consequences of own behavior are readily integrated into human action representations.

The rise of scientific psychology has been tied closely to the adoption of experimental techniques in the study of human cognition and behavior. Experiments provide an elegant and rigorous tool to test mechanistic theories and they do so by distilling a theoretically relevant idea into an observable measure as part of a behavioral task – a process commonly dubbed as operationalization. I argue that modern experimental psychology is plagued by a continued trend towards overlooking the critical role of such operationalization. This neglect manifests in two seemingly opposing ways, either in research that jumps to inadequate conclusions by playing down the role of tasks in generating the research findings or, conversely, in research that is mainly focused on examining tasks (“paradigms”) for their own sake rather than testing theoretical ideas. This state of affairs can be rectified by re-embracing the power of explicit, theory-driven operationalization as I discuss in general terms as well as applied to the exemplary case of research on rule-violation behavior. Shifting focus back to how a theoretical idea is operationalized in a given research program will help to render experimental research in psychology methodologically sound while at the same time being able to provide generalizable findings.

Frank William Abagnale Jr. hatte bereits vor seinem zwanzigsten Geburtstag einiges erreicht: Er hatte als Flugzeugpilot gearbeitet, war als Arzt und Jurist tätig gewesen und hatte zudem als Universitätsdozent Soziologie unterrichtet. Eine derartige Anzahl von Errungenschaften spricht dafür, dass der 1948 geborene Abagnale außerordentlich talentiert sein musste. Und tatsächlich verfügte er über großes Talent. Dieses Talent bezog sich allerdings genauso wenig auf das Fliegen von Flugzeugen wie auf das Behandeln von Patienten, das Auslegen von Gesetzestexten, oder das Verstehen soziologischer Zusammenhänge. Seine wahre Begabung lag vielmehr darin, die Gunst der Stunde zu nutzen und sich mithilfe gefälschter Zeugnisse und geschickt eingesetzter Improvisationskunst als jemand auszugeben, der er nicht war. Dieses Talent, zusammen mit seiner Gabe für das Fälschen von Bankschecks, ermöglichte ihm ein luxuriöses Leben, das nicht nur genügend Stoff für autobiographische Bücher lieferte, sondern dem auch in Form des Kinofilmes Catch Me If You Can (USA 2002, R: Steven Spielberg) ein Denkmal gesetzt wurde. Offensichtlich hatte Frank Abagnale es geschafft, sich über Jahre hinweg so gekonnt in Szene zu setzen, dass sein gesamtes soziales Umfeld davon getäuscht wurde. Dies ist umso beachtlicher, wenn man sich die Herausforderungen vor Augen führt, denen ein professioneller Hochstapler gegenüber steht: Er muss nicht nur eine stimmige, glaubhafte und zweckdienliche Geschichte entwerfen, sondern diese immer wieder so überzeugend wie konsistent darstellen, und dabei auf spontane Nachfragen souverän reagieren können, obwohl häufig hierzu Wissen vonnöten ist, das der Hochstapler nicht besitzen kann. Wie die Geschichte von Frank Abagnale eindrucksvoll zeigt, ist allerdings nicht nur die Hochstapelei selbst eine große Herausforderung. Vielmehr scheint auch das Aufdecken von Hochstapelei mit einiger Schwierigkeit verbunden zu sein – ganz unabhängig davon, ob es sich um eine ausgetüftelte, erdachte Identität handelt, oder stattdessen um eine kleine, wenig weitreichende Prahlerei im Alltag. Mit der Aufdeckung derartiger Falschaussagen bzw. von Lügen im Allgemeinen beschäftigt sich die psychologische Forschung seit vielen Jahrzehnten – und hat dabei verschiedene bemerkenswerte Ergebnisse erzielt. Einige dieser wegweisenden Forschungsansätze werden im Folgenden näher beleuchtet.

“I ain't gonna pay no attention to your rules” sings hard-rock legend AC/DC. Violation of rules and social norms is not confined to hard rock musicians, however. Rather, conflict between existing rules and own goals and intentions, is an important daily challenge for human agents.

Rule violations obviously can imply consequences and these consequences can be viewed from different perspectives such as moral reasoning, ethical implications and legal consequences. Whereas these perspectives provide elaborate accounts for rule violation behaviour, the cognitive processes during deliberate rule violations have not been investigated systematically to date. As a first step in this direction, I report three experimental series probing for cognitive conflict while violating a rule. These experiments focus specifically on circumscribed motor actions according to arbitrary experimental rules in a setting that does not enforce any sanctions or otherwise negative consequences upon the agent.

Even in this controlled setting, rule violations cause measurable cognitive conflict that is evident for responses in choice reaction tasks (Exp. 1-3) as well as for movement trajectories and other features of more complex actions (Exp. 4-6). These experiments also suggest the rule representation to remain continuously active while violating a rule, thus leaving a fingerprint on the agent’s behaviour. By contrast, the representation of the original rule seems to be diminished instantly if equivalent actions are not labelled as rule violations but rather as responses according to an alternative rule specifying the opposite mapping. Finally, deliberate rule violations seem to come with a specific electrophysiological signature which likely reflects the need to overcome the active rule representation (Exp. 7-8).

The present results are a first, detailed step towards characterising the cognitive implications of deliberate rule violations. Yet, different mechanisms might account for the observed effects; plausible candidates are continued but irrational expectations of negative consequences or, on a different note, difficulty relating to a complex representation of rule violations, e.g., as a combination of the rule itself and its negation. The differential contribution of both mechanisms to cognitive conflict during rule violations seems to be a promising field for future inquiry. The same is true for a possible extension of the present experimental approach to social situations and the investigation of expected sanctions and their impact on rule violations. Here, it seems especially relevant to address the contribution of the described conflict to decisions on whether or not to violate a rule in the first place.

Nearly two centuries after Johann Friedrich Herbart formulated the first concepts of what should later be called the ideomotor principle of action, we still do not have a precise understanding of the mechanisms linking ideas on the one hand and motor commands on the other hand. The present series of experiments closes two empirical gaps in ideomotor research.

Experiment 1 and 2 investigated whether ideomotor theory accounts for action control under rapidly varying action-effect relations, a setting that comes closer to daily actions than previous studies did. To this end, I employed a response-effect (R-E) compa-tibility design with context-specific R-E relations that varied trial-to-trial. Participants pressed a left or right key and produced spatially compatible, neutral, or incompatible action effects. Experiment 1 compared two groups of participants that could either freely choose their actions or reacted to imperative stimuli. In accordance with the theory of action control modes, R-E compatibility effects only resulted for freely chosen actions whereas no effects occurred for forced choice reactions. Experiment 2 showed that R-E compatibility effects, however, can result for both types of action when free and forced choices occur equally often in the same experimental block. Taken together, these findings suggest that ideomotor theory can indeed account for action control under ecologically valid settings.

Experiment 3 and 4 modified the design in order to suit the demands of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By using a relatively small proportion of free choice trials, R-E compatibility effects resulted only for free choice trials even though free and forced choice trials occurred in the same experimental block. This behavioural marker of effect anticipation then served as regressor for the fMRI response. Within the contrast of free versus forced choice trials, the behavioural effect correlated with the activity in several circumscribed regions, most importantly the hippocampal formation and the inferior parietal lobule. This analysis is the first neurophysiological demonstration of action control via action effect anticipations as suggested by ideomotor theory.

Trainability of visual search strategies on coloured displays and the impact of perceptual uniformity of the colour scale were assessed. Participants were asked to search for four targets in red-white-blue (RWB) displays while their eye movements were recorded. These displays were mainly composed of distracting noise and were designed to correspond to spatial frequencies tra-ditionally encountered in geophysical data images. The present study repli-cates previous findings that perceptual uniformity is a necessary prerequisite for the spontaneous application of a colour-based search strategy in RWB displays. It is further demonstrated that the application of this strategy is even more pronounced when novice participants are trained with eye-movement patterns of an expert in geophysical data images. Half of the participants were therefore shown video recordings of the gaze position of an expert scanning the displays whereas the other half was shown a static presentation of the images. This brief training session of approximately 6-7 minutes was shown to encourage the use of a colour based search strategy on uniform displays whereas it had no effect for non-uniform displays. It was also shown to in-crease the search speed slightly but regardless of the colour scale used. The enhanced application of the search by colour strategy after training with eye-movement patterns corroborates the use of uniform colour scales and pro-vides an easy-to-implement training method for further improving visual search behaviour.

Cognitive states such as action intentions leave a fingerprint on human behavior by shaping body movements. Movement trajectories thus provide a unique and elegant tool to uncover such hidden cognitive states, and we will sketch how the method of studying continuous trajectories of computer-mouse movements has evolved over the last decade. We will discuss two spotlights to show how the method can be fruitfully employed in different areas of psychological research. The first spotlight comes from the domain of human action control, and demonstrates how basic action intentions – anticipations of to-be-produced consequences of own body movements – are mirrored in trajectory deflections. The second spotlight features the assessment of cognitive conflict during rule violation behavior in clinically relevant samples. These examples underline the promise of employing hand- and mouse-tracking in both basic and applied research.

Dishonesty can take a toll on the liar’s memory, because he or she needs to tell a consistent lies not only in one instance but also across multiple occasions. We tested whether this toll is mitigated by associative learning, i.e., by associations between a question and its corresponding response and by associations between a question and its previous intentional context (honest vs. dishonest responding). Results indicated automatic retrieval of the response to a question if, and only if, the intentional context repeated but not when it switched between a prime and a later probe trial. These findings indicate hierarchical associations between (dis-)honest intentions, questions, and the corresponding responses, which allows for flexible, context-specific retrieval.

Bewusste Verstöße gegen Regeln und soziale Normen sind in der psychologischen Forschung bisher fast ausschließlich aus der Beobachter-Perspektive untersucht worden. Empirische Untersuchungen zielten dementsprechend darauf ab, das Auftreten eines Regelverstoßes auf Basis situativer und interindividueller Prädiktorvariablen vorherzusagen, sowie die Reaktion von Dritten auf beobachtete Regelverstöße zu erfassen. Der Fokus der Beobachter-Perspektive hat dabei zahlreiche wichtige Befunde zum Verständnis von regel- bzw. normverletzendem Verhalten zutage gefördert. Gleichzeitig bringt dieser Fokus jedoch auch eine wichtige Einschränkung mit sich: Die kognitiven und affektiven Prozesse, die beim Regelbrecher genau zum Zeitpunkt eines Regelverstoßes ablaufen, sind der Beobachter-Perspektive nicht zugänglich. Eine kürzlich entwickelte, individuelle Perspektive legt den Fokus daher auf eben diese kognitiven und affektiven Prozesse und ermöglicht somit einen neuartigen Zugang zum Phänomen bewusster Regelverstöße. Erste empirische Untersuchungen in dieser individuellen Perspektive zeigen in der Tat bemerkenswerte Eigenheiten regelwidrigen Verhaltens in Bezug auf Handlungsplanung, Bewegungstrajektorien, elektrophysiologische Maße sowie direkte affektive Verhaltenskonsequenzen. Ich möchte diese Befunde schlaglichtartig vorstellen, sowie weitere Forschungsfragen diskutieren, die sich im Kontext einer individuellen Perspektive vis-à-vis einer Beobachter-Perspektive auf bewusste Regelverstöße eröffnen.

The subjective feeling of agency is a pervasive phenomenon that accompanies intentional actions. Feelings of agency are typically explained in terms of predictive mechanisms – mostly equated with internal forward models – and in terms of postdictive mechanisms – mostly equated with retrospective judgments –, with both mechanisms supplementing each other. We present new evidence for a third mechanism that contributes to feelings of agency: The integration of action and effect in an event file. More precisely, short-term integration of action and effect (measured via the retrieval of an effect-associated response) predicted agency ratings on a trial-to-trial level. This finding opens up a new perspective on feelings of agency and represents a first step towards reconciling theories on the sense of agency with effect-based accounts of human action control.

What we intend to achieve with our actions affects the way we move our body. This has been repeatedly shown for both, movement-related intentions such as grasping and turning an object, and relatively high-level intentions such as the intention to collaborate or to compete with a social partner. The impact of an intermediate level of intentions – referring to action-contingent changes in the physical environment – is far less clear, however. We present three experiments that aim at scrutinizing this level of analysis by showing how such anticipated consequences affect movement trajectories. Participants steered a virtual avatar toward portals that displaced the avatar to a different but predictable location. Even though this displacement occurred only after the movement was completed, hand movements were clearly torn toward the anticipated final location of the avatar. These results show that properties of anticipated action consequences leave a fingerprint on movement trajectories and provide an opportunity to unite previous accounts on the relation of intentions and movements with general frameworks of action planning.

Human agents follow rules by default, and violating even simple rules yields cognitive conflict for the rule breaker. Previous experiments showed this conflict in various behavioural measures including response times and movement trajectories. Based on these experiments, we investigated the electrophysiological signature of rule violations. Most notably, rule violations are characterized by an attenuated P300 component when evaluating the stimulus prompting the behaviour, most likely reflecting increased response complexity. In addition to documenting this electrophysiological signature, our results reinforce theories that assume the P300 component to reflect the retrieval of learned stimulus-response associations, a process that clearly needs to be inhibited to allow for successful rule violation.

Not all rules can be obeyed at all times – and violating a rule has various consequences beyond its obvious ethical and legal implications. It is unknown, however, whether the simple fact of violating a rule (i.e., committing an error by intention) leaves a fingerprint on the acting agent, especially in the absence of any negative outcomes. A line of behavioural experiments targets this question using reaction time and trajectory data. Converging results indicate that cognitive conflict does indeed arise during rule violations even in such restricted settings. In turn, anticipating this conflict might bias decisions whether to violate a rule or not in the first place.

Introduction:

The phenomenon of lying has been studied from two very distinct neuroscientific perspectives, one focusing on lie detection and the other focusing on the processes accompanying active lying. The intense discussion of lie detection centers around polygraphic techniques and neurophysiological measures such as electroencephalography (EEG; Farwell & Donchin, 1991) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; Davatzikos et al., 2005). In this tradition, lie detection is typically studied in terms of increased responses to personally relevant items or “guilty knowledge”. Interestingly, active lying is studied by a rather different community that relies on distinct experimental paradigms such as the Sheffield lie test (Spence et al., 2001). Whereas recent years have seen considerable progress in uncovering the correlates of active lying in behavioral and fMRI data (Spence et al., 2008), the electrophysiological impact of active lying is not well understood. The present study pioneers this question with two experiments. These experiments also represent a first step toward disentangling the processes of deciding whether to lie or not and actually telling a lie.

Methods:

Thirty-two participants were asked to help a virtual police officer to locate a knife (Fig. 1). They signaled at the beginning of each trial whether they would tell the truth about the knife’s location or whether they would lie about it (referred to as intention hereafter). Then, they saw a shelf containing the knife at one of two positions and informed the officer via keypress about the knife’s location (referred to as target hereafter). In Experiment 1, each response to the target stimulus was followed by visual feedback (happy vs. sad officer) whereas Experiment 2 did not involve any feedback. We recorded EEG activity at 500 Hz throughout the experimental session via 32 active electrodes positioned in the extended 10/20 system (actiCAP; Brain Products, Germany) using a BrainVision QuickAmp amplifier. The EEG signal was segmented into separate epochs around the intention stimulus and the target stimulus, respectively, and we compared the event-related potentials (ERPs) between truth and lie trials. Additionally, we analyzed the participants’ choice behavior and reaction times (RTs) in each condition.



Results:

Participants showed a slight but consistent preference for truthful responses over lies (53.5% vs. 46.5%). Furthermore, participants responded faster when announcing a lie than when announcing to tell the truth in Experiment 2 but not in Experiment 1. When actually performing the lie, however, participants were considerably slower than when telling the truth across both experiments (Fig. 2). The corresponding ERPs related to the intention stimulus and to the target stimulus are plotted for electrode Cz in Figure 1. For the intention stimulus, lie and truth trials did not differ, whereas for the target stimulus lie trials showed a markedly attenuated P300 response as compared to truth trials. This effect was present across the central midline electrodes in both experiments (Fig. 3).





Conclusions:

The present experiments explored the electrophysiological correlates of active lying. Results indicate that only telling a lie but not the corresponding deliberation differs from truthful behavior. The marked differences for telling a lie are in line with previous behavioral (Debey et al., 2012) and fMRI (Bhatt et al., 2009) data suggesting that telling a lie is clearly more effortful than telling the truth, as P300 attenuation is typically caused by complex tasks and high working memory load (Kok, 2001). Furthermore, these results present a challenge for EEG-based algorithms for lie detection that usually rely on an increased P300 in response to personally relevant information whereas our findings suggest an opposite impact of actually telling a lie.

References:

Bhatt, S., Mbwana, J., Adeyemo, A., Sawyer, A., Hailu, A., & VanMeter, J. (2009), ‘Lying about facial recognition: An fMRI study’, Brain and Cognition, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 382-390.

Davatzikos, C., Ruparel, K., Fan, Y., Shen, D.G., Acharyya, M., Loughhead, J.W., Gur, R.C., & Langleben, D.D. (2005), 'Classifying spatial patterns of brain activity with machine learning methods: Application to lie detection', NeuroImage, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 663-668.

Debey, E., Verschuere, B., & Crombez, G. (2012), ‘Lying and executive control: An experimental investigation using ego depletion and goal neglect.’, Acta Psychologica, vol. 140, no. 2, pp. 133-141.

Farwell, L.A., & Donchin, E. (1991), ‘The truth will out: Interrogative Polygraphy (“lie detection”) with event-related brain potentials’, Psychophysiology, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 531-547.

Kok, A. (2001), ‘On the utility of P3 amplitude as a measure of processing capacity’, Psychophysiology, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 557-577.

Spence, S.A., Farrow, T.F.D., Herford, A.E., Wilkinson, I.D., Zheng, Y., & Woodruff, P.W.R. (2001), ‘Behavioural and functional anatomical correlates of deception in humans’, NeuroReport, vol. 12, no. 13, pp. 2849-2853.

Spence, S.A., Kaylor-Hughes, C., Farrow, T.F.D., & Wilkinson, I. D. (2008), 'Speaking of secrets and lies: The contribution to ventrolateral prefrontal cortex to vocal deception.', NeuroImage, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 1411-1418.

Wilhelm von Humboldt hat in seinem Aufsatz „Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts“ skizziert, wie sprachliche Eigenheiten das Denken beeinflussen können. Inuit können beispielsweise deutlich elaborierter über verschiedene Arten von Schnee nachdenken als der handelsübliche deutschsprachige Nachwuchswissenschaftler. Ähnliche Überlegungen wurden später von Benjamin Lee Whorf geäußert und sind so als „Whorf’sche Hypothese“ in die Sprachwissenschaft eingegangen. Doch was hat diese Hypothese mit psychologischen Doktorarbeiten zu tun? Dieser Frage möchte ich mit Hinblick auf klingonische Schlachtrufe und einschlägige Hardrock-Texte nachgehen.

Not all rules can be obeyed at all times, and failures to obey a rule can be either unintended or intended. Unintended failures to obey a rule (errors and mistakes) have been studied intensely in the area of cognitive neuroscience and such errors are characterized by a distinct event-related potential, known as the error-related negativity (ERN). In contrast, intended failures to obey a rule (violations) have not been studied neuroscientifically to date. We are the first to present data addressing this phenomenon and our results suggest that violations do not yield an ERN-like component. Rather, they seem to be characterized by an attenuated P300 component when evaluating the stimulus prompting the rule-violating behavior, possibly reflecting increased response complexity. These data represent a first neuroscientific step towards characterizing the processes underlying intended rule violations in healthy individuals.

Not all rules can be obeyed at all times – and violating a rule by intention has various consequences beyond its obvious ethical and legal implications. It is unknown, however, whether the simple fact of violating a rule (i.e., committing an error by intention) leaves a fingerprint on the acting agent. A line of behavioural experiments targets this question using reaction time and trajectory data. Converging results indicate that intentional errors are indeed separable from typical intentional actions while also being distinct from errors that are committed by mistake.

Imitation is assumed to serve crucial functions in social interaction, including action understanding, empathy, and learning; yet all these functions only apply to the imitating observer. Here, we reveal a distinct function of imitation for the action model: Anticipating to be imitated facilitates the production of one’s own motor actions. Specifically, anticipated motor responses of social counterparts serve as mental cues to retrieve corresponding motor commands in order to orchestrate one’s own actions.

The own name constitutes a unique part of conscious awareness, but it is also unique for the unconscious mind? To answer this question, we employed a subliminal priming experiment. Participants decided as fast as possible whether a name or a non-word was presented as target. Unbeknown to them, already before the target, a masked prime stimulus was briefly presented. The prime was either one of the targets, a non-word, the own name of the participant, or the name of a yoked participant. When one's own name was presented as prime, responding to a name target was substantially facilitated, whereas presenting the name of the other participant had the same effect as presenting a non-word prime. Thus, we show that - in contrast to any other name - one's own name has the power to bias a person's actions, even when the presence of the own name is unexpected and unconscious. The brain identifies and processes its name even in the absence of conscious awareness.

Imitation is assumed to serve crucial functions in social interaction, including action understanding, empathy, and learning; yet all these functions only apply to the imitating observer. Here, we reveal a distinct function of imitation for the action model: Anticipating to be imitated facilitates the production of one’s own motor actions. Specifically, anticipated motor responses of social counterparts serve as mental cues to retrieve corresponding motor commands in order to orchestrate one’s own actions.

Does it make a difference whether we perform a freely chosen action or whether we respond immediately to environmental demands? Recent research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that both types of actions are functionally dissociable. Although several accounts have been proposed, such as the distinction between stimulus- and intention-based processes, the exact mechanisms and functional characteristics remained controversial. This symposium addresses how such processes can be captured by neurophysiological and behavioural methods. More precisely, we will discuss how stimulus- and intention-based processes (1) mediate the acquisition of behavioural competence, (2) compete or interact in immediate action control, and (3) express themselves in social interaction.

The wardrobe malfunction — an unanticipated exposure of bodily parts in the public — has become a prevailing issue in concerts, shows and other celebrity events that is reliably reported by the media. The internet as the fastest source for celebrity gossip allows measuring the impact of such wardrobe malfunctions on the public interest in a celebrity. This measurement in turn allows conclusions about intention, motivation, and internet behaviour of a wide variety of internet users. The present study exemplifies the use of an innovative non-reactive measure of active interest — the Search Volume Index — to assess the impact of a variety of internet-related phenomena, including wardrobe malfunctions. Results indicate that interest in a celebrity increases immediately after such an event and stays at a high level for about three weeks (the wardrobe plateau). This special form of celebrity gossip thus meets a constant interest of a substantial proportion of internet users.

Research on human action has extensively covered controlled and automatic processes in the transformation of stimulus information into motor action, and how conflict between both systems is solved. However, the question of whether automatic S-R translation per se depends on top-down control states has received little attention. This study addressed this issue by manipulating top-down control state (instructed S-R mapping) and automatic bottom-up processing (retrieval of S-R memory traces) independently from each other. Using a color/shape task-switching paradigm, we compared cross-talk triggered by distractor stimuli, for which the instructed S-R mapping and the S-R associations compiled at the beginning of the experiment matched, with the cross-talk triggered by distractor stimuli, for which (re)instructed mapping and compiled S-R associations did not match. Interestingly, the latter kind of distractors did not yield any cross-talk, demonstrating that automatic S-R retrieval occurs only if the S-R associations concur with the currently valid S-R mapping.

If a prepared action shares one or more features with an action-irrelevant stimulus in the environment, accurate perception and identification of the stimulus are impaired. This phenomenon (known as Action-Effect-Blindness, AEB) was demonstrated with overlapping proximal action features (e.g., left vs. right key presses) and features of distal stimuli (e.g., arrowheads). The present study expands the AEB phenomenon to learned action effects which are assumed to become endogenously activated as part of ideomotor action control. We show that the anticipation of an action effect shields its representation from other processes – impairing reactions to this stimulus if it is presented exogenously. This finding indicates that AEB is not due to interference of mere physical stimulus and response features but plays a functional role for perception in action.

How does our mind produce physical action of our body? How are goals transformed into overt behaviour? For about 200 years, philosophers and psychologists hypothesized the transformation from mind to body to occur via the anticipation of sensory consequences of an action. And whereas there is ample evidence for this hypothesis in behavioural experiments, the neural underpinnings of action control via sensory anticipations are virtually unknown. Consequently, current neuroscientific models of action control do not account for this mechanism. Using a response-effect compatibility paradigm and functional magnetic resonance imaging, the present study identified the inferior parietal cortex and the parahippocampal gyrus as key regions for this type of action control. These findings set the stage for a neuroscientific framework for explaining action control by sensory anticipations and thus a potential synthesis of psychological and neuroscientific approaches to human action.

Introduction:

Recent imaging studies set out to investigate the neural correlate of ideomotor theory, a classical philosophical approach to action control. Ideomotor theory assumes the brain to store bidirectional associations of actions and following sensory changes to address an action by anticipating its sensory effects. While several studies found neurophysiological evidence for the learning process underlying ideomotor action control (Kühn et al., 2010; Melcher et al., 2008), the process of action control by sensory effect anticipations has not yet been studied on the neural level.

Methods:

We adopted a well-established behavioral paradigm to measure ideomotor effect anticipations – the R-E compatibility paradigm (Kunde, 2001; Pfister et al., 2010) – and modified it for event-related fMRI (see Figure A). Participants pressed a left or right response button and produced spatially compatible, neutral, or incompatible visual action effects. As an additional variation, participants either selected the response endogenously or reacted according to a target stimulus (exogenous selection). We hypothesized this manipulation to result in more pronounced ideomotor effect anticipations for endogenously selected actions than for exogenously selected actions, preparing the ground for fMRI contrast analysis.



Results:

Behavioral results confirmed our hypothesis: Response-effect compatibility influenced reaction times for endogenously selected actions but had no impact for exogenously selected actions. Individual R-E compatibility effects – a pure measure for ideomotor effect anticipations – were then used as regressors for the BOLD signal within the contrast endogenous vs. exogenous selection (Figure B and C). This analysis identified the left inferior parietal cortex as well as the parahippocampal gyrus as cornerstones of a neural network subserving action control by sensory effect anticipations.

Conclusions:

In accordance with recent findings on the neural implementation of action planning (Desmurget et al., 2009) and action effect processing (Kühn et al., 2010; Melcher et al., 2008), the present findings point to a pronounced role of imaginative sensory processes in parietal circuits even in early stages of action control. This notion supplements classical models of human action control (cf. Haggard, 2008) that assume a predominant role of the prefrontal cortex but do not account for the functional role of sensory anticipations for action selection and initiation.

References:

Desmurget, M., et al. (2009). Movement Intention After Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans. Science, 324(5928), 811-813. DOI: 10.1126/science.1169896.

Haggard, P. (2008). Human volition: Towards a neuroscience of will. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(12), 934-946. DOI: 10.1038/nrn2497.

Kühn, S., et al. (2010). The Internal Anticipation of Sensory Action Effects: When Action Induces FFA and PPA Activity. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4(54), 1-7. DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2010.00054.

Kunde, W. (2001). Response-effect compatibility in manual choice reaction tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(2), 387-394. DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.27.2.387.

Melcher, T., et al. (2008). The neural substrate of the ideomotor principle: An event-related fMRI analysis. NeuroImage, 39(3), 1274-1288. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.09.049.

Pfister, R., et al. (2010). Adaptive Control of Ideomotor Effect Anticipations. Acta Psychologica, 135(3), 316-322. DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.08.006.

Der Beitrag stellt konvergente Evidenz aus zwei fMRT Untersuchungen für eine grundlegende Seiten- bzw. Handasymmetrie ideomotorischer Prozesse vor. Die betreffenden Studien verwendeten das von Elsner und Hommel (2001) entwickelte zwei-phasige ideomotorische Lernparadigma, welches die Bestimmung von Hirnaktivierung in Bezug auf zwei basale ideomotorische Prozesse erlaubt: (a) ideomotorisches Lernen (Erwerb erlernter Handlungseffekte) und (b) ideomotorische Handlungsaktivierung (Auslösung motorischer Handlungstendenzen durch die passive Wahrnehmung erlernter Handlungseffekte). Aufbauend auf den Befunden einer früheren PET-Studie (Elsner et al., 2002) beschreiben die Studienergebnisse ein differenziertes Muster neuronaler Aktivität in Bezug auf die Wahrnehmung erlernter Handlungseffekte u.a. in (para-)hippocampalen und (prä-)motorischen Regionen, als neuronales Substrat ideomotorischer Handlungsaktivierung. Ergebnisse zeigen hier eine deutliche Seitenasymmetrie mit reduzierten oder sogar ausbleibenden Effekten (Hirnaktivierungen) für rechtshändige erlernte Handlungseffekte. In einem nächsten Schritt konnte der relativ stärkere Handlungsaktivierungseffekt durch linkshändige erlernte Handlungseffekte mit relativ stärkerem Assoziations- bzw. ideomotorischem Lernen für linkshändige (vs. rechtshändige) Handlungseffekte in Beziehung gesetzt werden.

Wie schafft es unser Gehirn, zielgerichtete Bewegungen unserer Gliedmaßen hervorzurufen? Die ideomotorische Hypothese gibt eine einfache und sparsame Antwort auf diese fundamentale Frage: Bidirektionale Verbindungen von Handlungen und Handlungseffekten ermöglichen es, dass Bewegungen über die Antizipation ihrer Effekte hervorgerufen werden können. Trotz stichhaltiger empirischer Evidenz in Verhaltensstudien sind die neurophysiologischen Grundlagen handlungsleitender Effektantizipationen jedoch noch weitestgehend unbekannt. Wir adaptierten daher das Paradigma der Reaktions-Effekt-(R-E)-Kompatibilität (Kunde, 2001) für die Erfordernisse der funktionalen Magnetresonanztomographie. Mittels eines regressionsanalytischen Ansatzes war es uns möglich, Veränderungen des MR-Signals spezifisch mit Prozessen der Effektantizipation in Verbindung zu bringen. Unsere Ergebnisse deuten hier auf eine wichtige Rolle des inferioren Parietallappens und des Gyrus parahippocampalis hin. Speziell die Aktivierung im inferioren Parietallappen kann dabei plausibel mit Prozessen der Handlungsselektion und -spezifikation in Verbindung gebracht werden und stellt somit ein erstes neurophysiologisches Indiz für die funktionale Rolle ideomotorischer Effektantizipationen dar.

Die klassische Unterscheidung von automatischen und kontrollierten Prozessen in der Handlungskontrolle ist bisher vor allem in Experimenten untersucht worden, in denen kontrollierte Verarbeitung gegen störende automatische Verarbeitung durchgesetzt werden musste – etwa in der Stroop- oder der Simon-Aufgabe. Es gibt bislang jedoch keine Befunde zu der Frage, ob auch automatische Prozesse selbst von kontrollierten Prozessen beeinflusst werden können. Zur Überprüfung dieser Spekulation haben wir automatische Verarbeitung (gelerntes S-R-Mapping) und kontrollierte intentionale Verarbeitung (instruiertes S-R-Mapping) in einem Aufgabenwechselparadigma gezielt gegeneinander ausgespielt. Hierbei verglichen wir Crosstalk von Distraktoren bei denen das S-R-Mapping nach einer Lernphase uminstruiert wurde (uminstruierte Distraktoren) mit solchen, bei denen gelerntes und instruiertes Mapping übereinstimmten (konstante Distraktoren). Interessanterweise zeigten sich nur bei konstanten Distraktoren übliche Crosstalk-Effekte, bei uminstruierten Distraktoren jedoch nicht. Scheinbar erfolgt ein automatischer Abruf der gerade gelernten S-R-Verbindungen also nur dann, wenn sie mit der momentanen Handlungsintention übereinstimmen.

According to ideomotor theory, voluntary actions are selected and initiated by means of anticipated action effects. Prior experiments demonstrated these effect anticipations with response–effect (R–E) compatibility phenomena, using blocked R–E relations, whereas daily actions typically produce context-dependent effects. In the present study, we accounted for this natural variability and investigated R–E compatibility, varying R–E compatibility trial by trial. In line with recent findings on ideomotor learning, R–E compatibility influenced responding only when participants responded in free choice trials, assuming that participants then adopted an intention-based action control mode. In contrast, R–E compatibility had no impact when participants responded according to imperative stimuli throughout the experiment—thus, when participants adopted a stimulus-based action control mode. Interestingly, once an intention-based mode was established because of free choice trials within an experimental block, we observed R–E compatibility effects in free as well as forced choice trials.

How can goals be transformed into overt action? How is our brain able to evoke movements of our limbs? Ideomotor theory provides a parsimonious and elegant answer to these fundamental questions: it assumes that representations of actions and their effects are connected bidirectionally so that actions can be triggered by the anticipation of potential action effects. Recent behavioural and neuroimaging research suggests that such ideomotor effect anticipations are most pronounced in freely chosen actions as compared to forced choice reactions. Furthermore, several reports speculated about the neural substrate of ideomotor action control in the vast fronto-parietal network subserving voluntary action. Within this framework, we present a paradigm that directly addresses the neural substrate of ideomotor effect anticipations with event-related fMRI. We employed a response-effect compatibility design with free and forced choice actions (left vs. right key presses) resulting in spatially compatible, neutral, or incompatible action effects. Response-effect compatibility varied on a trial-to-trial basis and a cue informed the participants about the current response-effect mapping at the beginning of each trial. The resulting behavioural markers for ideomotor effect anticipations (response-effect compatibility effects) allowed us to identify the neural correlates of ideomotor action control within the fMRI signal.

Das ideomotorische Prinzip postuliert Bewegungskontrolle über bidirektionale Assoziationen von Handlungen und darauf folgenden Effekten, sodass Handlungen durch die Antizipation ihrer Effekte hervorgerufen werden können. Diese ideomotorische Bewegungskontrolle konnte bisher eindrucksvoll in Experimenten nachgewiesen werden, die geblockte Handlungs-Effekt-Beziehungen verwendeten, nicht jedoch wenn Handlungs-Effekt-Beziehungen kontextuell variierten. Um die empirische Evidenz für ideomotorische Bewegungskontrolle auf diese natürlicheren Situationen zu erweitern, verwendeten wir ein Reaktions-Effekt-Kompatibilitäts-Paradigma bei dem in jedem Durchgang ein Hinweisreiz über die momentane räumliche Kompatibilität von Reaktionstasten und Effekten informierte. Dabei wurden solche Reaktionen schneller initiiert, die zu räumlich kompatiblen Effekten führten als solche die zu inkompatiblen Effekten führten. Dies gilt allerdings nur wenn die Handlung in einem intentionalen Handlungskontrollmodus ausgeführt wird, der durch die freie Wahl zwischen verschiedenen Handlungsalternativen hervorgerufen wird. Wird eine Handlung hingegen in einem reaktiven Modus als Reaktion auf einen imperativen Stimulus ausgeführt, scheinen distale Effekte nicht zur Selektion und Steuerung der Handlung herangezogen zu werden.

Das ideomotorische Prinzip erklärt Bewegungskontrolle über bidirektionale Verbindungen von Handlungen und ihren Effekten, sodass Handlungen durch die Antizipation ihrer Effekte aus-gewählt und gesteuert werden. Bisher konnte ideomotorische Bewegungskontrolle jedoch nur in speziellen experimentellen Anordnungen eindeutig gezeigt werden, etwa wenn in einem Block-Design eine Handlung immer zu demselben Effekt führte. Wenn ein und dieselbe Handlung jedoch in Abhängigkeit des Bewegungskontextes verschiedene arbiträre Effekte erzeugt, wenn also beispielsweise das Drücken eines Knopfes einmal den CD-Player und ein anderes Mal die Mikrowelle aktiviert, wurde bisher keine eindeutige Evidenz für derartige Handlungskontrolle berichtet. Mithilfe eines Reaktions-Effekt-Kompatibilitäts-Paradigmas zeigten wir, dass das ideomotorische Prinzip auch unter diesen Umständen einen validen Ansatz zur Handlungskontrolle darstellen kann. In jedem Durchgang wurden die Probanden dabei über die derzeitige räumliche Kompatibilität von Reaktionstasten und erzeugten Reizen informiert (kompatibel vs. inkompatibel vs. neutral), wobei solche Reaktionen schneller initiiert wurden, die zu räumlich kompatiblen Effekten führen würden als solche die zu inkompatiblen Effekten führen würden. Dies gilt allerdings nur wenn die Handlung in einem intentionalen Handlungskontrollmodus ausgeführt wird, der durch die freie Wahl zwischen verschiedenen Handlungsalternativen hervorgerufen wird. Wird eine Handlung hingegen in einem reaktiven Modus als Reaktion auf einen imperativen Stimulus ausgeführt, scheinen distale Effekte nicht zur Selektion und Steuerung der Handlung herangezogen zu werden.