How do intentions turn into body movements? Ideomotor theory provides a straightforward answer: Through learning, actions become bidirectionally linked to their effects; thus, actions can be initiated by anticipating those effects. Yet, the representational format of such “effects” is still debated: While modern accounts of the ideomotor principle often emphasize the role of goal codes (i.e., anticipated end-states) historical formulations highlight the role of codes of desired changes (i.e., anticipated transitions). In fact, recent evidence from a response effect compatibility paradigm seems to favor the notion of transitional codes. However, it is possible that such transitional codes dominate only in long-term memory structures (i.e., links that are built by blockwise manipulations). To assess this possibility, we employed a prime-probe paradigm and investigated which representational format underlies short-term bindings between actions and effects.