16:30 - 18:00
Mon-HS2-Talk III-
Mon-Talk III-
Room: HS2
Chair/s:
Silvia Selimi, Philip Schmalbrock, Elena Benini
Humans have to coordinate many different inputs to generate a goal-directed output. Although it seems trivial that we can execute most actions in our everyday life effortlessly - it is not. Several independent processes merge to produce seemingly trivial looking actions. In research on human action control, the processes of binding and retrieval have received increased interest in recent years. In this context, a unified account emerged that strives to specify binding and retrieval in action control (BRAC) over a range of related experimental phenomena and paradigms (Frings et al., 2020). In the second symposium, we take a broad look at research that contrasts the ubiquity and limitations of action control. The first talk looks at the role of binding and retrieval for action plans that are no longer needed. The following talk investigates the role of context and episode discriminability for retrieval processes and connects to the event segmentation literature. It is followed by an investigation on the influence of stimulus modality on the segmentation of action sequences. The last two talks specifically test prevalent assumptions in the action control literature and highlight important boundaries to action control mechanisms. The contributions presented in both symposia underline the diversity of the research areas investigating human action control and highlight the prominent role of binding and retrieval processes for moving forward in understanding goal-directed human action.
Stop Right There: The Role of Binding and Retrieval in Action Termination
Mon-HS2-Talk III-01
Presented by: Viola Mocke
Viola Mocke 1, Christian Beste 2, Bernhard Pastötter 3, Wilfried Kunde 1
1 University of Würzburg, 2 TU Dresden, 3 Trier University
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