Stop Right There: The Role of Binding and Retrieval in Action Termination
Mon-HS2-Talk III-01
Presented by: Viola Mocke
While binding and retrieval have been proposed as essential to the construction of action plans, we explore how these and related processes might also be involved in the deconstruction of action plans. In short, what happens to action plans when they are no longer to be executed? Situations in which deconstruction of action plans is necessary include aborting an action already in progress, stopping an action just before it is to be executed, or discarding an action plan long before its execution. We investigated the latter situation in an ABBA design by having participants plan an action A but perform another action B before action A. Typically, performance in action B is impaired if it partially overlaps with the plan for action A that has not yet been executed (compared to no overlap). Importantly, after a sufficiently long action A planning interval but before action B, a signal indicated whether action A should still be executed after action B (75%) or not (25%). When the plan for action A had not been discarded, we found the typical partial overlap costs in action B, indicating retrieval of features from action plan A. However, in trials where action plan A had been discarded before action B, we found clear signs of action plan dismantling in the form of feature unbinding. These results suggest that not only action plan construction but also deconstruction builds on the principle of feature binding.
Keywords: unbinding, event file, action plan, action control