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.
Exploring indirect retrieval of stimulus-response bindings for merely associated stimuli
Mon-HS2-Talk III-03
Presented by: Mrudula Arunkumar
Mrudula Arunkumar 1, Klaus Rothermund 1, Viola Mocke 2, Wilfried Kunde 2, Carina G.Giesen 1
1 Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, 2 Julius-Maximilians Universität Würzburg
When a stimulus is paired with a response, a stimulus response binding (SRB) is formed. Subsequent stimulus repetition retrieves SRB from memory, which facilitates (impedes) performance when the same (different) response is required again. In this study, we explored whether indirect retrieval of SRB by an associated stimulus is possible. Participants first went through a learning task to acquire novel stimulus-stimulus associations. The same stimulus pairs were later presented in a prime-probe task to assess direct and indirect retrieval of SRB. Participants classified word color. Probe words were either identical to prime words (test for direct retrieval), or corresponded to the associated stimulus (test for indirect retrieval), or were unrelated words (baseline). Independently of word relation, response relation (repetition vs. change) across prime and probe trials was manipulated. In a highly powered study (N=130), we only obtained evidence for direct retrieval due to identical word repetition in the probe, whereas evidence for indirect retrieval due presentation of an associated word was absent. Controlling for participants who did not remember stimulus-stimulus associations did not alter the findings. Hence, our results show that indirect retrieval does not occur at the SRB level as the associated words do not show similar levels of costs/benefits due to response retrieval compared to identical word repetitions.
Keywords: Indirect retrieval, associations, stimulus-response bindings