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.
Contextual Discriminability Affects Successful Retrieval of Stimulus-Response Episodes
Mon-HS2-Talk III-02
Presented by: Susanne Mayr
Malte Möller 1, Ruyi Qiu 1, Iring Koch 2, Susanne Mayr 1
1 University of Passau, 2 RWTH Aachen University
Based on the event segmentation theory (Zacks et al. 2007), the on- and offset of an external context demarcates the beginning and end of a so-called event, temporally structuring the ongoing stream of stimulation in the environment. Following this notion, the present study is concerned with the role of context in structuring sequences of perception-action couplings (so-called stimulus-response or S-R episodes) in memory. If context also structures sequences of S-R episodes, successful retrieval of an individual episode should be impaired when multiple episodes share a context, presumably due to an increased likelihood of confusing jointly retrieved episodes as compared with a condition in which retrieved episodes are associated with different contexts. This hypothesis was tested by manipulating contextual discriminability on S-R binding and retrieval in an auditory negative priming paradigm with sequences of three successive presentations (i.e., pre-prime, prime, and probe) in each trial. In each presentation, participants identified a target sound accompanied by distractor via a keypress. Sine tones (300 Hz/600 Hz) served as context. Context tones either encompassed pre-prime and prime or changed after the response to the pre-prime target, resulting in conditions with low and high discriminability, respectively. No context was presented during the probe. Increased erroneous probe responding with the former prime response in trials with a distractor-to-target repetition was taken as indicator of S-R binding and retrieval. The increase in S-R binding and retrieval was stronger in the high- than in the low-discriminability condition, suggesting the organization of S-R episode sequences by context.
Keywords: event segmentation, contextual discriminability, S-R binding, memory