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The benefit of no choice: goal-directed plans enhance perceptual processing

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Abstract

Choosing among different options is costly. Typically, response times are slower if participants can choose between several alternatives (free-choice) compared to when a stimulus determines a single correct response (forced-choice). This performance difference is commonly attributed to additional cognitive processing in free-choice tasks, which require time-consuming decisions between response options. Alternatively, the forced-choice advantage might result from facilitated perceptual processing, a prediction derived from the framework of implementation intentions. This hypothesis was tested in three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 were PRP experiments and showed the expected underadditive interaction of the SOA manipulation and task type, pointing to a pre-central perceptual origin of the performance difference. Using the additive-factors logic, Experiment 3 further supported this view. We discuss the findings in the light of alternative accounts and offer potential mechanisms underlying performance differences in forced- and free-choice tasks.

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Notes

  1. Note that Berlyne (1957a, b) has already speculated about why participants do respond at all in free-choice tasks and why the respective RTs are longer than in forced-choice tasks. Briefly, he alluded to the idea of enhanced response competition in the case of free-choice tasks where no clear stimulus-induced bias exists. We return to this interpretation in the General Discussion and relate it to the present findings.

  2. Of course, individuals could spontaneously (i.e., without explicit instruction) conceive free choices as stimulus–response links like “if an X appears, then I press the left key about half of the times”. However, research indicates that most individuals substantially benefit from the explicit instruction to use such stimulus–response links (for review, see Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006), suggesting that spontaneous planning does not play a critical role. Further, implementation intentions are the more effective the more clearly defined the linked behavior in the “then”-part is (Gollwitzer, 1993; Gollwitzer, Wieber, Meyers, & McCrea, 2010). The definiteness of the if–then plan is necessarily higher for forced- than for free-choice tasks in setups like the present study. Thus, one might in fact speak of stimulus–response links that are provided by forced-choice instructions. We do not deny this possibility and return to this view in the General Discussion. For now, however, as our reasoning was derived from the framework of implementation intentions, we prefer speaking of if–then plans.

  3. In Berlyne’s (1957a) experiments both (forced-choice) stimuli were presented in a free-choice trial.

  4. Due to a programming error, participants 1–16 of Experiment 1b had only 85 instead of 90 trials per block.

  5. At least in Experiment 3, Berlyne (1957a) doubled the free-choice trials for analyses to reach a comparable numbers of trials.

  6. This refers not only to the immediately preceding trial, but to the longer history of previous responses.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; German Research Foundation), grant JA 2307/1-1 awarded to Markus Janczyk. The co-authors were supported by the DFG research unit FOR 1882 Psychoeconomics. We thank Arvid Herwig for many helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology III, University of Würzburg, Röntgenring 11, 97070, Würzburg, Germany

    Markus Janczyk

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Constance, Germany

    Michael Dambacher, Maik Bieleke & Peter M. Gollwitzer

  3. Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, USA

    Peter M. Gollwitzer

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  1. Markus Janczyk
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  2. Michael Dambacher
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  3. Maik Bieleke
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  4. Peter M. Gollwitzer
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Correspondence to Markus Janczyk.

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Janczyk, M., Dambacher, M., Bieleke, M. et al. The benefit of no choice: goal-directed plans enhance perceptual processing. Psychological Research 79, 206–220 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0549-5

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