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The role of executive control in the activation of manual affordances

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Abstract

We investigated the role of executive control processes in the activation of manual affordances in two experiments combining stimulus–response compatibility (SRC) and dual-task paradigms. We registered an inverse SRC effect in the presence of a parallel backward-counting task in Experiment 1, and a cancellation of the SRC effect in Experiment 2 when a parallel Stroop-like task was used. We interpret our data as supporting a self-inhibition account of the affordance activation control. Accordingly, the role of executive processes is to prevent self-inhibition in supraliminal conditions: when cognitive resources are depleted by a parallel task, the self-inhibition mechanism becomes active and irrelevantly potentiated affordances are inhibited, leading to the emergence of an inverse SRC effect. In addition, the difference between data patterns observed in the two experiments suggests that the exact roles of the executive processes involved during the activation of affordances may differ. The results suggest a mechanism for action-related activation monitoring based on a flexible control over automatically potentiated actions. The paper discusses the proposed mechanism in detail and outlines further research directions.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Dr. Alexey Kotov for his comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and for his help with the data collection, as well as Dr. Nikola Vukovic for his comments on the materials and procedure of Experiment 2. This research was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) Grant 15-06-02233 A and by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’. The article was prepared within the framework of a subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Program.

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  1. Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation

    Nikolay Dagaev, Yury Shtyrov & Andriy Myachykov

  2. Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Institute for Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Yury Shtyrov

  3. Department of Psychology, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

    Andriy Myachykov

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  1. Nikolay Dagaev
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Correspondence to Nikolay Dagaev.

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Nikolay Dagaev declares that he has no conflict of interest. Yury Shtyrov declares that he has no conflict of interest. Andriy Myachykov declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Dagaev, N., Shtyrov, Y. & Myachykov, A. The role of executive control in the activation of manual affordances. Psychological Research 81, 1110–1124 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0807-9

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