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.
The boundaries of binding: Task-, response-, and modality-dependence for binding and retrieval in action control
Mon-HS2-Talk III-05
Presented by: Lars-Michael Schöpper
Lars-Michael Schöpper 1, Markus Lappe 2, Christian Frings 1
1 University of Trier, 2 University of Münster
When responding to stimuli, it is assumed that response and stimulus features are bound into a common representation – a so-called event file. If any component of the event file repeats, the previous information is retrieved, affecting performance. Action control theories commonly assume binding and retrieval to be ubiquitous processes affecting all actions; in turn, the resulting so-called binding effects should be observed irrespective of task type, modality of the target, and so on. In this talk we present research that offers clear limitations to this assumption, by merging ideas and findings of action control with related fields such as attentional orienting and visual search. First, binding effects are task dependent, in that they typically do not occur in detection and localization performance. Second, it is possible to spur on the occurrence of binding effects in such task types, for example, by introducing specific response mappings. Third, some of these findings differ for auditory and visual targets, suggesting modality dependence for binding effects in action control. Importantly, all these limitations do not fit into a framework of omnipresent processes affecting all actions.
Keywords: action control, attentional orienting, stimulus-response binding