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Visually guided, aimed movements can be unaffected by stimulus–response uncertainty

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Abstract

Response times generally increase linearly with the logarithm of the number of potential stimulus–response alternatives (e.g., Hick’s law). The ubiquity and theoretical importance of this generalization make exceptions particularly interesting. Recently, Kveraga et al. (Exp Brain Res 146:307, 2002) added a third to the two previously known exceptions, demonstrating that saccade latencies were unaffected by stimulus–response uncertainty. They suggest that visually guided saccades are exceptional, because these movements can be automatically selected using a privileged pathway: the topographically organized regions in superior colliculus that convert spatially coded visual activity into spatially coded motor commands. We report that visually guided, aimed hand movements also are unaffected by both stimulus–response uncertainty and stimulus–response repetition. A second experiment demonstrated that this lack of an uncertainty effect persists for equiluminant stimuli. This result suggests that posterior parietal cortex is not the privileged pathway eliminating stimulus–response uncertainty for hand movements. Because hand movements are not guided by mechanisms in the superior colliculus, our results cast doubt on the privileged-pathway hypothesis, at least for hand movements. Instead, the absence of stimulus–response uncertainty may occur only in tasks that do not require the stimulus to be associated with a response effector and that have high stimulus–response compatibility.

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Notes

  1. For both eye movements and hand movements, this analysis presupposes that the movement can be planned without reference to the initial position of the hand or the eye.

  2. When they studied anti-saccades, eye movements made in the direction opposite where the target appeared, Kveraga et al. (2002) found a large uncertainty effect.

  3. In this and several other papers (Berryhill et al. 2004, 2005), these authors emphasize the importance of the comparison between the no-uncertainty condition, N = 1, and the conditions normally studied in these experiments, with N > 1. Such a comparison is difficult to make convincingly because these conditions potentially differ in much more than the quantitative level of S-R uncertainty: the step from one to two also involves the transition from simple to choice reaction time. In the simple reaction time case, the stimulus can function simply as a “Go” signal: there is no necessity for the participant to identify the stimulus or for it to be processed at all. Also, in experiments such as this, with stimuli arrayed about the fixation, participants may be tempted to ignore the indicated fixation point and foveate the single possible stimulus location, when the response is not an eye movement; of course, when the response is an eye movement and so eye position before the stimulus onset is being monitored, participants cannot use this strategy to reduce the latency when N = 1. An additional issue is that, unless there is a variable fore period or catch trials, participants may anticipate the onset of the stimulus. Any of these three differences between simple and choice reaction time would lead to faster responses for N = 1 than might otherwise be expected, as has been found in virtually every experiment reporting data of this type. The fact that there is no difference in these conditions with saccades or smooth pursuit eye movements probably reflects more about differences in the eye-movement control system or participants’ strategies than it does about the response–selection processes that are typically the focus in studies examining uncertainty in choice-reaction time tasks.

  4. One interesting exception to this generalization about previous designs is the experiment reported by Pellizer and Hedges (2003). Although we feel that much can be learned from the radically different design used in this paper, we decided not to adopt it because it involves randomizing the sets of possible target locations from trial to trial rather than blocking these sets as is traditionally done. Until we have had an opportunity to convince ourselves that there are absolutely no important implications of this choice, we felt that adopting such a design would unnecessarily complicate the comparisons that we wish to make with previous research.

  5. At each point, data triples, consisting of x-position, y-position, and direction of movement in the xy-plane, were extracted from the trajectories recorded for a participant’s 384 movements using cubic-spline interpolation. The 48 triples for each target were then fit using a multivariate normal distribution. Based on the eight fits, estimates were computed for the probability of a movement to each target being correctly classified or incorrectly associated with one of the seven other locations.

  6. In Fitts’ law, the index of difficulty is defined as log2(2 × D/W). Using this index, the difficulty of the movements used in this experiment ranges from 4.2 to 4.6.

  7. However, a post-hoc comparison of the results in Proctor and Wang (1997) Experiment 1B and Experiment 2 leads to the opposite result for a comparison of uni- versus bi-manual keypress movements. This appears to be an area that could use further exploration.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Sylvan Kornblum for many useful discussions concerning the stimulus–response uncertainty effects. We also are grateful to Nina Macdonald, Robert W. Proctor, and an anonymous reviewer for useful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697-5100, USA

    Charles E. Wright, Valerie F. Marino, Shane A. Belovsky & Charles Chubb

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  1. Charles E. Wright
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  2. Valerie F. Marino
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  3. Shane A. Belovsky
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  4. Charles Chubb
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Correspondence to Charles E. Wright.

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Wright, C.E., Marino, V.F., Belovsky, S.A. et al. Visually guided, aimed movements can be unaffected by stimulus–response uncertainty. Exp Brain Res 179, 475–496 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-006-0805-z

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