15:00 - 16:30
Tue—Casino_1.811—Poster2—57
Tue-Poster2
Room:
Room: Casino_1.811
What primes instructed prevention actions? The presence or absence of the prevented event?
Tue—Casino_1.811—Poster2—5703
Presented by: Solveig Tonn
Solveig Tonn 1*Viola Mocke 2Moritz Schaaf 1Wilfried Kunde 2
1 Trier University, 2 University of Wuerzburg
There is ample evidence that actions are primed by perceiving the events they are known to produce. However, when humans act, they not only produce certain perceptual events, they also prevent other perceptual events from occurring. But how can models of effect-based action control account for this defining property of prevention actions, for this deliberate not-occurrence of a certain event? Here, we explored this question by investigating whether actions that aim at preventing a certain event are primed by the presence of that prevented event, or the presence of another event that logically follows from the absence of the prevented event. Participants were instructed that each of two keypresses prevented a certain letter. Additionally, they could perceive that each keypress not only prevented the instructed letter but also produced the respectively other letter. In an unrelated classification task, participants had to classify these letters by executing the very same actions. We found actions were facilitated by encountering the letter that was known to be prevented by it, as compared to the letter that was known to be produced by it. The results suggest that the representation of prevention actions relies on the presence of the event that the action intends to prevent. This is in line with the notion that ideomotor linkages resulting from instructions are based on links between actions and specific effect components, but these effect components do not necessarily comply with perceivable environmental events that the actions are known to produce.
Keywords: prevention action, absent event, ideomotor theory, congruency effect