Movements or targets: What makes an action in action–effect learning?

Abstract

According to ideomotor theory, actions become linked to the sensory feedback they contingently produce, so that anticipating the feedback automatically evokes the action it typically results from. Numerous recent studies have provided evidence in favour of such action–effect learning but left an important issue unresolved. It remains unspecified to what extent action–effect learning is based on associating effect-representations to representations of the performed movements or to representations of the targets at which the behaviour aimed at. Two experiments were designed to clarify this issue. In an acquisition phase, participants learned the contingency between key presses and effect tones. In a following test phase, key–effect and movement–effect relations were orthogonally assessed by changing the hand–key mapping for one half of the participants. Experiment 1 showed precedence for target–effect over movement–effect learning in a forced-choice RT task. In Experiment 2, target–effect learning was also shown to influence the outcome of response selection in a free-choice task. Altogether, the data indicate that both movement–effect and target–effect associations contribute to the formation of action–effect linkages—provided that movements and targets are likewise contingently related to the effects.

Keywords:

• Behavioural control
• Motor learning
• Ideomotor principle

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to valuable comments of Andrew Delamater, Martina Rieger, and an anonymous reviewer on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ This effect corresponds to the interaction of movement–tone mapping and hand–key mapping in the former ANOVA.

² The assumed representation of actions by a bundle of sensory features is consistent with the theory of event coding (TEC; Hommel et al., 2001), which also assumes that actions are represented by their sensory consequences. However, TEC focuses: “on ‘early’ cognitive antecedents of action that stand for, or represent, certain features of events that are to be generated in the environment (=actions). TEC does not consider the complex machinery of the ‘late’ motor processes that subserve their realization (i.e., the control and coordination of movements)” (Hommel et al., 2001, p. 849). In contrast, the present experiments explicitly deal with the question of to what extent representation of distal action–effects gain the power to address concrete movements—see later.