Abstract
Often one must depart from an intended course of events to react to sudden situational demands before resuming his or her original action retained in working memory. Retaining an action plan in working memory (WM) can delay or facilitate the execution of an intervening action when the action features of the two action plans partly overlap (partial repetition) compared to when they do not overlap. We investigated whether partial repetition costs (PRCs) or benefits (PRBs) occur when the intervening event is an ideomotor-compatible stimulus that is a biological representation of the response required by the participant. Participants viewed two visual events and retained an action plan to the first event (A) while executing a speeded response to the second, intervening event (B). In Experiment 1A, the two visual events were ideomotor compatible, non-ideomotor compatible (abstract), or one was ideomotor compatible, and the other abstract. Results showed PRCs for all event A–B stimulus combinations with reduced PRCs for intervening, ideomotor compatible events. In contrast to previous research, there was no evidence that ideomotor-compatible actions were automatic and bypassed the selection bottleneck. Experiment 1B confirmed PRCs for ideomotor compatible stimuli that more accurately mimicked the required response. Findings suggest that mechanisms for activating, selecting, and retaining action plans are similar between ideomotor compatible and abstract visual events. We conclude that PRCs occur in response to intervening events when action plans are generated offline and rely on WM, including those for ideomotor-compatible stimuli; but PRBs may be restricted to actions generated online. This conclusion is consistent with the perceptual-motor framework by Goodale and Milner (Trends in Neuroscience 15:22–25, 1992).
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Notes
Responses were only defined by execution of the second keypress response in Experiment 1A, and hence RT for the first keypress was not available. However, the first and second keypress RTs were recorded and are reported in Experiment 1B.
Assessing response accuracy to event A was necessary to ensure participants retained the action plan to the first event in memory while executing their response to the interruption (event B). The response accuracy results for event A have to be interpreted with caution as participant inclusion required that they achieve 80% accuracy. Also, we did not analyze RT for event A for two reasons. First, we asked participants to take their time to respond to event A in order to respond as accurately as possible. They were also told that we were not concerned with how fast they responded to event A, only how accurate they responded. Second, RT for event A was confounded with responses executed to event B. That is, when there was action overlap (i.e., responses to events A and B shared the same response hand), the motor response for event A had to wait for the response to event B to finish before it could start; but when there was no action overlap, the motor response for event A did not necessarily have to wait for the motor response to event B to finish before it could start.
Similar to Experiment 1A, RTs to the second key press are shown. RTs to the first keypress were 161–171 ms faster than the second keypress for all three conditions. RTs to the first keypress were 646 ms, 690 ms, and 718 ms for the no retention, no overlap, and partial overlap conditions respectively.
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Acknowledgements
This work was inspired by experimental data previously collected by James R. Miller in his masters’ thesis. We thank Iring Koch for his recommendation to cross the ideomotor compatible and abstract stimulus events utilized in Experiment 1A. Finally, we thank Washington State University undergraduates Hannah Jensen and Erin McMeekin for their help with data collection.
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Fournier, L.R., Richardson, B.P. Partial repetition between action plans delays responses to ideomotor compatible stimuli. Psychological Research 86, 627–641 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01491-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01491-9