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Feature integration across perception and action: event files affect response choice

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Abstract

Five experiments investigated the spontaneous integration of stimulus and response features. Participants performed simple, prepared responses (R1) to the mere presence of Go signals (S1) before carrying out another, freely chosen response (R2) to another stimulus (S2), the main question being whether the likelihood of repeating a response depends on whether or not the stimulus, or some of its features, are repeated. Indeed, participants were more likely to repeat the previous response if stimulus form or color was repeated than if it was alternated. The same was true for stimulus location, but only if location was made task-relevant, whether by defining the response set in terms of location, by requiring the report of S2 location, or by having S1 to be selected against a distractor. These findings suggest that task-relevant stimulus and response features are spontaneously integrated into independent, local event files, each linking one stimulus to one response feature. Upon reactivation of one member of the binary link activation is spread to the other, thereby increasing the likelihood to repeat a response if one or more stimulus features are repeated. These findings support the idea that both perceptual events and action plans are cognitively represented in terms of their features, and that feature-integration processes cross borders between perception and action.

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Notes

  1. The basic idea underlying this (uncommon but not a priori unreasonable) consideration assumes that binding may not be obligatory or necessary for perception or identification to occur. Indeed, if only one event would be represented at a given time there would be no real binding problem: the different features of the event would be coded in different feature maps or systems, but they could still converge on a particular behavior, be that a conscious experience or an overt response, without being "tagged" or "bound". However, binding problems do come into play if more than one event is to be represented at a time, because this raises the question of which features belong to which event. Experiments 4 and 5 aimed at creating such problems.

  2. In the present study, these binary linkages showed up as main effects of stimulus-feature repetitions on the dependent variable response repetition. These main effects of form, color, and location repetition explained substantial portions of the variance: η2=0.18–0.43, η2=0.14–0.24, η2=0.11–0.31, and η2=0.11–0.19 in Experiments 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively. The variance explained by two-way interactions between these three variables (which imply three-way interactions including response repetition) accounted for less variance without exception, η2=0.02–0.08, η2=0.001–0.04, η2=0.004–0.04, and η2=0.001–0.08, respectively, and the contribution from the three-way interaction (implying a four-way interaction involving all stimulus features and response repetition) was negligible, η2<0.02 in all cases.

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Acknowledgements

Part of this research was carried out at and supported by the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, Cognition & Action, in Munich, Germany, and other parts were supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I wish to thank Matt Crump, Jason Leboe, and Bruce Milliken for comments on previous versions of this paper, and Patrizia Falkenberg, Alexandra Heinrich, and Nicola Korherr at the Max Planck, and Tijmen Moerland, Shalu Saini, and Menno van der Woude at Leiden University for running the experiments and collecting the data.

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    Bernhard Hommel

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Hommel, B. Feature integration across perception and action: event files affect response choice. Psychological Research 71, 42–63 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-005-0035-1

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