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. 2023 Aug;85(6):1761-1767.
doi: 10.3758/s13414-023-02754-w. Epub 2023 Jul 7.

Effect-less? Event-files are not terminated by distal action effects

Christian Frings  1 , Silvia Selimi  2 , Paula Soballa  2 , Daniel H Weissman  3
Affiliations

Effect-less? Event-files are not terminated by distal action effects

Christian Frings et al. Atten Percept Psychophys. 2023 Aug.

Abstract

Event-files that bind features of stimuli, responses, and action effects figure prominently in contemporary views of action control. When a previous feature repeats, a previous event-file is retrieved and can influence current performance. It is unclear, however, what terminates an event-file. A tacit assumption is that registering the distal (e.g., visual or auditory) sensory consequences of an action (i.e., the "action effect") terminates the event-file, thereby making it available for retrieval. We tested three different action-effect conditions (no distal action effect, visual action effect, or auditory action effect) in the same stimulus-response (S-R) binding task and observed no modulation of S-R binding effects. Instead, there were comparably large binding effects in all conditions. This suggests that proximal (e.g., somatosensory, proprioceptive) action effects terminate event-files independent of distal (e.g., visual, auditory) action effects or that the role event-file termination plays for S-R binding effects needs to be corrected. We conclude that current views of action control require further specification.

Keywords: Action effects; Event-file termination; Perception and action.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Top: Schematic trial sequence for the three conditions: (1) no distal action effect (green), (2) visual action effect (orange), and (3) auditory action effect (blue). Stimuli are not drawn to scale, see text for further explanations. Bottom: Binding effects in milliseconds as a function of experimental condition depicted at the level of individual effects (left), group-level box plots (middle), and frequency distributions (right). * p < .001
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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