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.
Binding Interactions in Working Memory
Mon-HS2-Talk III-04
Presented by: Christoph Geißler
Christoph Geißler, Silvia Selimi, Philip Schmalbrock, Christian Frings, Birte Moeller
Trier University
Binding accounts propose that whenever we want to execute an action, we must first bind all task-relevant percepts and motor programs together to derive a working action plan. These bindings outlast action execution and can influence subsequent actions, leading to so-called binding effects. Thus, if preexisting bindings and a newly generated action plan coincide, action performance benefits are observed. However, if preexisting bindings and a newly generated action plan do not coincide, because features only partially overlap, performance costs are observed. So far, laboratory studies have focused on binding effects resulting from a single preceding action episode. However, natural behavior is almost always composed of a string of action episodes, all of which in theory generate bindings. Because bindings are stored in limited working memory space, multiple active bindings should interfere with one another. However, in what manner, is so far unclear. Concretely, binding competition might depend on the quality of the bound elements, or it might be independent of the quality of the bound items. We employed a response-response binding paradigm with a prime-intervening-trial-probe design to investigate residual binding effects in a probe, after an additional intervening action pair that was either a full change or a partial repetition from the prime. While we found that intervening-trials in general reduced binding effects in the probe, the type of intervening-trial did not substantially influence probe binding effects. This is clear evidence for content independent interference between bindings that most likely results from an overall limit in working memory capacity.
Keywords: Action Control, Binding, Working Memory, Competition