Elsevier

Acta Psychologica

Volume 109, Issue 2, February 2002, Pages 137-155
Acta Psychologica

The impact of anticipated action effects on action planning

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0001-6918(01)00053-1Get rights and content

Abstract

Three experiments with a total of 72 participants investigated the assumption that motor actions are planned in terms of their sensorial effects. Participants had to prepare a certain action A that consistently led to a sensorial effect (a tone of certain pitch). Instead of (in Experiment 1) or before (in Experiments 2 and 3) the execution of the prepared action, another response B had to be carried out, which either resulted in the same or in a different auditory effect (a tone of same or different pitch). It was found that a to-be-executed response B was in general initiated more quickly when it resulted in the same effect as a concurrently prepared response A. The results are considered as evidence for the basic notion that the preparation and initiation even of very simple actions is mediated by an anticipation of their reafferences.

Introduction

Except for reflexive and emotional behavior humans generally act in order to produce certain effects, may it be to open a bottle, to turn on a radio, to sign a contract or whatever else. In any individual instance a particular action (or sequence of actions) has to be determined that will produce the desired effect reliably, and apparently humans are capable of doing so with little effort and without any conscious reflection. How do actors accomplish this task? More than 100 years ago, introspective psychologists like Harleß (1861), Herbart (1824) or James (1981, 1890) argued that a certain voluntary action is directly initiated by a memory retrieval of those sensorial effects that were experienced to consistently follow when the action was carried out in the past. According to this idea, the human actor acquires bidirectional associations between actions and their reliable effects, which are activated in the opposite direction if a certain effect is desired, so that the anticipated (desired) effect evokes the action that consistently produced this effect. In an extreme, one can assume that actions become exhaustively represented by their sensorial effects and that thus actions can be accessed solely by recollecting their reafferences – an idea that following James (1981, 1890) has been known as the ideo-motor (IM) hypothesis.

The general notion that action effects contribute to behavioral control is not an exclusive assumption of the IM hypothesis (cf. Hoffmann, 1993, Hommel, 1998 for a comparison of the IM hypothesis with other concepts of motor control). For example, the closed-loop theory by Adams (1971) as well as the Schema theory by Schmidt (1975) assume that the sensorial effects of a performed action are temporarily stored (in a so called “perceptual trace” [Adams, 1971] or “recognition Schema” [Schmidt, 1975]). However, in these theories action effects are primarily functional for control of movement execution rather than for movement selection as asserted by IM theory. The Schema theory assumes that movement selection is mediated by so called recall schemata which are functionally dissociated from the effect-representing recognition schemata. Likewise, in closed-loop theory perceptual traces are relevant solely for the online movement correction by means of a comparison with actual action feedback. Hence, the particular assumption of the IM hypothesis that representations of forthcoming effects are an inevitable component of the cognitive action antecedents (i.e. that action effects are functional in advance of movement execution for planning or initiating a movement) is barely acknowledged in traditional theories of motor control, and has thus rarely been examined experimentally so far.

Only recently the IM hypothesis experienced a revival (cf. Hoffmann, 1993, Hommel, 1998, Prinz, 1997). Basically, two lines of research can be distinguished. Some studies investigated the factors that influence the learning-dependent formation of associations between actions and their effects (e.g. Hoffmann et al., 2001, Stock and Hoffmann, in press, Ziessler, 1998). Other studies aimed to test the assumption that motor acts are indeed evoked by an activation of their (already associated) effect codes. These studies convincingly demonstrated that the perception of an action effect (or effect-resembling stimulus) increases the probability and speed of selecting the particular action that produces this effect (e.g. Elsner and Hommel, 2001, Greenwald, 1970a, Greenwald, 1970b, Hommel, 1993, Hommel, 1996, Ziessler and Nattkemper, in press).

Action induction by action-effect perception strongly suggests that actions and their effects are associated in a bi-directional manner, otherwise a stimulated effect code could hardly induce the motor pattern from which it typically originates. Still, this does not yet prove that effect codes do become activated in case they are not already perceptually available in advance of response selection. This, however, is the crucial assumption of the IM hypothesis which asserts that actions are selected by anticipated rather than by perceived effects (cf. Greenwald, 1970b, Kunde, 2001). Thus, in our view it is desirable to show that effect codes become endogenously activated (i.e. anticipated) during action planning even when not sensorially stimulated. Some clues for the relevance of such anticipatory effect representations can be drawn from induction studies. For example response induction is much stronger when subjects also intend to produce the effects which are presented to them, that is when a presented response effect meets an already pre-activated effect representation (Hommel, 1993, Hommel, 1996).

The purpose of the present study was to reinforce the relevance of anticipatory effect representations for action planning by showing that response effects have an impact on response preparation even when they are available exclusively after response execution. Observing such influences of forthcoming response effects necessarily implies that effect codes are actually activated in advance of overt responding. Otherwise it is logically impossible that a future effect could influence a response that precedes this effect in time.

Section snippets

General method and predictions

To pursue this purpose, we employed different variations of a response preparation paradigm. The subjects were instructed to prepare as well as possible one out of four possible responses (e.g. simple key-presses). The common (and crucial) feature of the reported experiments was that each response produced one out of two auditory effects, either a low-pitched or a high-pitched tone. These effects were assigned in a way that respectively two of the four responses led to the same tone (cf. Fig. 1

Experiment 1

Experiment 1 tested the collateral facilitation hypothesis by means of a response reprogramming paradigm (cf. Meyer & Gordon, 1985). Participants performed a choice-reaction task in which four colors were assigned to four response keys. Shortly before the stimulus was presented, a cue indicated the probable next response. In 25% of the cases the cue was invalid, that is, not the cued action but one of the remaining three actions had to be carried out.

Experiment 2

There are two reasons for why the results of Experiment 1 are not fully conclusive and require further confirmation. First, the influence of effect-correspondence was evident only after a sufficient amount of practice. Apparently the tones must have been experienced as consistent outcomes of the actions frequently enough in order to become associated with them. This possibility was taken into account in Experiment 2 by introducing a training phase in which participants were given ample

Experiment 3

So far, we used rather simple keypress responses. In contrast, Stoet and Hommel (1999) had participants perform considerably more complex actions. Actually action A could be considered as a motor sequence subjects had to release a homekey to touch another response key and to return to the start position again. The difference in response complexity may have somehow caused the contradictory patterns of results of the two studies. One may for example argue that with the simple actions in the

General discussion

The present experiments were prompted by the idea that motor acts are cognitively represented and thus accessed by their sensorial effects. In order to support this assumption, motor actions were coupled with auditory effects and participants were required to prepare for a certain action. The participants in Experiment 1 sometimes had to execute another action instead of the prepared one, and in Experiments 2 and 3 they always had to execute another action before executing the prepared one.

Acknowledgements

Funding of this research was provided by the German Research Foundation (Grant HO 1301/6-1). We thank Bernhard Hommel, Gijsbert Stoet, and Martinus J. Buekers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. We also thank Christian Stöcker for improving the English.

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