In the course of development organisms learn to associate their actions with the effects these actions have in the environment. Recent studies have shown that perceiving or anticipating action-effects automatically activates actions, which formerly have been experienced to cause these effects (Elsner & Hommel, 2001). Using subliminal priming paradigms and electrophysiological measures I investigated whether subliminally (i.e., not consciously perceivable) presented action-effects can automatically activate associated actions and if so, whether this response priming by action-effects can bias free-choice actions. Secondly I investigated whether action-effects with different emotional valences influence response selection differently. To address the first question three experiments were performed. Each experiment consisted of two experimental phases. The first phase, the acquisition-phase, was a learning phase were simple key-press actions were associated with simple visual stimuli (i.e., action-effects; diamond or square) that were contingent on the actions. Immediately after the acquisition-phase the test-phase followed, in which participants performed free-choice actions after the presentation of a Go-signal. In Experiments 2 and 3 a NoGo-signal indicating that responses had to be withheld could appear with the same likelihood as the Go-signal. Unknown to the participants, one of the former action-effects (diamond or square) was presented subliminally prior to each Go- and NoGo-signal to investigate the influence of unconscious action-effects on response selection. Taken together, the results of the test-phases provided strong evidence that even subliminally presented (i.e., unconscious) action-effects can automatically activate associated responses. The response priming by action-effects became evident in the lateralized readiness potential (LRP), an electrophysiological indicator of specific response activation processes. Under certain circumstanced this automatic response activation can bias free-choice actions although participants experienced the actions as freely chosen. In the test-phase of the first experiment more acquisition-phase-consistent than –inconsistent responses were chosen. If, for instance, a left key-press had been associated with a square during the acquisition-phase, the left key was chosen significantly more often after the subliminal presentation of a square in the test-phase. At least three factors seemed to influence which responses were chosen and executed: The strength of the priming effect, the complexity of the task (i.e., pure Go-blocks or intermixed Go/NoGo-blocks), and the elapsed time between the prime stimulus and the Go-signal. To address the second question simple key-press actions were linked to action-effects with different emotional valences (positive vs. negative pictures accompanied by high or low tones) during the acquisition-phase. In the subsequent test-phase, the effects-tones that had been associated with negative or positive pictures were presented and followed by a Go-signal, after which participants had to freely choose to press one of the two response keys. Results indicated that the anticipation of the emotional valence of an action-effect influenced free-choice action. Whereas the effect-tones induced a clear response bias (i.e., more acquisition-consistent than –inconsistent key-choices) if they had been associated with a positive emotional valence, this response bias was not reliable for action-effects associated with negative emotional features. In summary, the present results provide further proof for ideomotor theories of action control (James, 1890; Elsner & Hommel, 2001) which state that actions are automatically activated by anticipating their consequences.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:24845 |
| Date | 11 July 2006 |
| Creators | Wendt-Kürschner, Juliane |
| Contributors | Goschke, Thomas, Kirschbaum, Clemens, Hoffmann, Joachim |
| Publisher | Technische Universität Dresden |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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