16:30 - 18:00
Parallel sessions 6
16:30 - 18:00
Room: HSZ - N3
Chair/s:
Roland Pfister
Theories on how the human mind represents behavioral rules and norms distinguish between explicit, verbal formats and implicit, procedural formats. Here we ask whether the latter representational format draws on fundamental cognitive mechanisms of regularity detection and statistical learning. The symposium thus connects basic, low-level approaches from cognitive psychology to the concepts of rules and rule-guided behavior. The speakers will cover cognitive fundamentals of rule representations, principles of regularity detection and rule discovery in streams of incoming stimulation, procedural learning of rules through mental simulation, and challenges derived from using negated rather than affirmative rules to steer human behavior. The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies, from movement trajectory analysis to peripheral physiology (EMG) and neuroscientific approaches (EEG, fMRI) to elucidate the question of how much rule representations draw on implicit, procedural learning.
 
Submission 439
Rule Encoding by Mental Simulation
SymposiumTalk-04
Presented by: Yanick Kloss
Yanick Kloss 1, Wilfried Kunde 1, Roland Pfister 2, 3
1 Department of Psychology (III), University of Würzburg, Germany
2 Department of Psychology (General Psychology), University of Trier, Germany
3 Institute for Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience, University of Trier, Germany
Rules exert a powerful influence on human behavior. They even shape human action through instructions without any previous experience of following the rule. Here we suggest that rules become ingrained deeply into the human cognitive system because encoding a rule entails mentally simulating an instance of rule following. We tested the mental simulation hypothesis by measuring sub-threshold muscular activity in the left and right forearm via electromyography (EMG) while presenting rule instructions mapping a stimulus to either a left or a right key press. As predicted, EMG activity during instructions was higher in effectors targeted by an instruction as compared to non-targeted effectors. Mental simulation, therefore, likely represents a key mechanism that ingrains a rule into the cognitive system and paves the way for later retrieval of rule-based behavior.