Response Preparation Affects Cognitive Motor Control

Abstract

Objective: We investigated how the ability to control whether or not to inhibit an action is affected by the response preparation.

Background: The ability to control actions is a central skill to properly behave in complex environments. Increased levels of response preparation are associated with reduced response times, but how they directly affect the ability to control actions is not well explored. We investigated how the response preparation affects the ability to control the generation of actions in the context of a stop selective task.

Method: Participants performed a visuo-motor stop selective task.

Results: We found that an increased level of response preparation reduced the ability to control actions. In the condition with high preparation, we observed shorter response times and increased probability of wrong responses to a request to stop, compared to a condition with a lower level of preparation.

Conclusion: We demonstrated that high response preparation hinders action control.

Application: Understanding the cognitive factors that affect the ability to properly control actions is crucial to develop devices that can be exploited in different contexts such as the aviation, industrial, and military. We demonstrated that subjects' response preparation is a key factor influencing their ability to flexibly control their reaction to different stimuli. This study offers a suitable paradigm that can be used to investigate which system features in a controlled task promote an optimal balance between response speed and error rate.

Keywords: control process; decision making; motor control; perceptual-motor performance; response time.