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Anticipation of delayed action-effects: learning when an effect occurs, without knowing what this effect will be

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Abstract

According to the ideomotor principle, behavior is controlled via a retrieval of the sensory consequences that will follow from the respective movement (“action-effects”). These consequences include not only what will happen, but also when something will happen. In fact, recollecting the temporal duration between response and effect takes time and prolongs the initiation of the response. We investigated the associative structure of action-effect learning with delayed effects and asked whether participants acquire integrated action-time-effect episodes that comprise a compound of all three elements or whether they acquire separate traces that connect actions to the time until an effect occurs and actions to the effects that follow them. In three experiments, results showed that participants retrieve temporal intervals that follow from their actions even when the identity of the effect could not be learned. Furthermore, retrieval of temporal intervals in isolation was not inferior to retrieval of temporal intervals that were consistently followed by predictable action-effects. More specifically, when tested under extinction, retrieval of action-time and action-identity associations seems to compete against each other, similar to overshadowing effects reported for stimulus–response conditioning. Together, these results suggest that people anticipate when the consequences of their action will occur, independently from what the consequences will be.

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Notes

  1. Due to a programming error, instructions stated that in some trials a white asterisk would appear and participants would have to freely decide which key they wanted to press. However, these trials were never presented during the experiment.

  2. Possibly, if participants in the fixed-effect mapping group had formed integrative A–T–E episodes, temporal information would only be retrieved for consistent responses (e.g. E > T>A), but not for inconsistent responses. However, an additional analysis for consistent response choices only showed no evidence for a delay-anticipation effect, |t| < 1.

  3. A similar effect may have taken place in some studies where multiple action-effects provided contradictory information, for example, with the proprioceptive feedback occurring on the left side, whereas a visual action-effect occurred on the right side (e.g., Hommel, 1993; Janczyk, Pfister, Hommel, & Kunde, 2014). In such studies, one effect feature emerged as the main determinant of behavior and reduced/eliminated the impact of the other feature(s).

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Acknowledgments

Data, analysis scripts, and program files for this article can be retrieved from the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/vbg6w/?view_only=b0a38156b0754d438981d5b25ab2e4c4. Work of MJ is supported by the Institutional Strategy of the University of Tübingen (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), ZUK 63).

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  1. Department of Psychology, Albert Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Engelbergerstrasse 41, 79085, Freiburg, Germany

    David Dignath

  2. Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Markus Janczyk

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  1. David Dignath
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Correspondence to David Dignath.

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Dignath, D., Janczyk, M. Anticipation of delayed action-effects: learning when an effect occurs, without knowing what this effect will be. Psychological Research 81, 1072–1083 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0797-7

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