Abstract
In two experiments we studied how motor responses affect stimulus encoding when stimuli and responses are functionally unrelated and merely overlap in time. Such R-S effects across S-R assignments have been reported by Schubö, Aschersleben, and Prinz (2001), who found that stimulus encoding was affected by concurrent response execution in the sense of a contrast (i.e., emphasizing differences). The present study aimed at elucidating the mechanisms underlying this effect. Experiment 1 studied the time course of the R-S effect. Contrast was only obtained for short intertrial intervals (ITIs). With long ITIs contrast turned into assimilation (i.e., emphasizing similarities). Experiment 2 excluded an interpretation of the assimilation effect in terms of motor repetition. Our findings support the notion of a shared representational domain for perception and action control, and suggest that contrast between stimulus and response codes emerges when two S-R assignments compete with each other in perception. When perceptual competition is over, assimilation emerges in memory.
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Notes
Note that SORT is not designed to study unspecific interference effects resulting from the fact that two tasks compete for the same pool of unspecific processing capacity at the same time. Rather, we focused on specific interference effects arising from the overlap of features (i.e., similarity) between the stimulus to be encoded and the response to be delivered at the same time on a given trial.
Dynamics of the movements were chosen to comply with natural human drawing movements, so that velocity decreased when the curvature of the trajectory increased (e.g., Lacquaniti et al., 1983, 1984). Since no parameter estimations were available for sinusoidal trajectories, we constructed the motion patterns and their dynamics on the basis of empirical trajectories generated in a pretest. Five pretest participants ran through a 4-h practice phase on 2 consecutive days. For each pretest participant we selected 20 reproductions that deviated least from the intended spatiotemporal pattern. The stimuli used in the experiments were formed by averaging, yielding the temporal pattern described above.
For a complete description of the training phase, see Schubö et al. (2001).
The two extreme values of y(t) are localized by identifying the zero crossings of ẏ(t). The points of inflection in y(t) are localized by identifying maximum and minimum values of ẏ(t), which themselves are identified by locating the zero crossings of the second derivative of the time function of the vertical coordinate ÿ̇(t), that is, the acceleration profile. A complete description of the data-analysis procedure is given in Schubö et al. (2001).
Due to the introduction of an intervening task in the intertrial interval, the ITI could not be controlled exactly in this experiment. Although the procedure was given a predefined temporal structure (a new trial n could be started 3 s at the earliest after stimulus presentation had ended in trial n–1), participants took much longer to perform the intervening tasks. In fact, participants could decide themselves when to start the intervening task and when to proceed with the next trial. The average ITI, calculated roughly from block durations, was between 6 and 7 s.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a scholarship of the Max Planck Society. Experiment 2 is part of the first author's doctoral thesis (Schubö, 1998). We wish to thank Asher Koriat, Claire Michaels, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticisms, suggestions, and comments on an earlier draft. We are also grateful to Frank Miedreich for programming, Stefanie Guter and Kai Engbert for their help with data collection, and Heide John for stylistic suggestions.
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Schubö, A., Prinz, W. & Aschersleben, G. Perceiving while acting: action affects perception. Psychological Research 68, 208–215 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-003-0133-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-003-0133-x