The impact of the verbal instruction and task characteristics on effect-based action control

Abstract

According to ideomotor theory, when people perform a movement and observe its subsequent effect, they acquire a bidirectional action-effect association. If at a later point they want to produce the effect, its anticipation activates and allows executing the corresponding action. In ideomotor induction tasks, several task characteristics determine whether participants use the experimentally induced action-effect associations to pre-activate the corresponding actions. Here, we assess the impact of the verbal instruction, the task relevance of the effect stimuli and the presentation of post-response effects on the expression of action-effect associations. The results show that an instruction stressing the stimulus-effect correspondence prompts participants to utilize the presented effects more than an instruction stressing the stimulus-response correspondence. Furthermore, the induced action-effect associations were only expressed when the effects were relevant for the task and when post-response effects were presented in the test phase. These findings show the importance of the particular task construction for the expression of the experimentally manipulated action-effect knowledge.

Ideonamic: An integrative computational dynamic model of ideomotor learning and effect-based action control.

“…In our simulations with the basic version of the model, these components have been left out, as they did not play a role in the experiments we addressed. However, there are ideomotor experiments whose results are largely influenced by these factors (Eder & Dignath, 2017;Vogel et al, 2018Vogel et al, , 2020, and we also aimed to design IDEONAMIC to capture these observations. Ideomotor literature suggests that the fact that participants express action-effect associations more or less depending on the instruction, task settings, and further secondary influences does not root in differences in attention (Herwig & Waszak, 2009), but in differences in intentional weighting (Memelink & Hommel, 2013).…”

How People Learn to Act on Goals: A New Examination of the Mechanistic Ideomotor Action Account

“…That is, even though actions consistently produced outcomes in the acquisition phase, they no longer did so in the test phase. Indeed, the presentation of the post-response effect does have an impact of an IM effect not only in the instructed compatibility test task (Elsner & Hommel, 2001), but also in the trial-based interference task (Vogel et al, 2020). Yet, it is not unlikely that participants update their representations, or conclude that learned action-outcome relations do no longer apply.…”

“…Indeed, the presentation of post-response outcomes in the test phase has been found to have a compelling impact on the IM effect not only in the instructed compatibility test task (e.g., Elsner & Hommel, 2001), but also in the cue-based compatibility test task (e.g., Vogel et al, 2020). And as argued, there is evidence suggesting that participants can quickly acquire new propositional rules.…”

“…Second, as we already established that participants acquired explicit knowledge of the action-outcome mappings in the previous two experiments (c.f. Sun et al, 2020) we choose to emphasize the presence of the outcomes in the instructions based on the finding from Vogel et al (2020). They established that the ideomotor compatibility effect was strengthened when participant's attention was guided to the association between stimulus and effect (S-E) compared to stimulus and response (S-R).…”

“…Evidence mainly comes from the two-stage paradigm in which participants first acquire action-outcome links by engaging in actions and observing their outcomes, and then engage in a test phase which measures whether actions are influenced by primes that share properties with their associated outcomes. While the literature provides numerous studies that present evidence in line with ideomotor theory (Shin et al, 2010), conclusive evidence for the automatic nature of this effect is lacking (see similar findings and discussion in Sun et al, 2020 andVogel et al, 2020). Recently, Sun and colleagues (2020) have found that while learning of action-outcome relations can occur automatically (i.e., without instructions), strict tests for automatic ideomotor action in the test phase failed to provide evidence for automaticity.…”