Schmidt Thomas, Hauch Valerie, Schmidt Filipp
Faculty of Social Sciences, Experimental Psychology Unit, University of Kaiserslautern, Erwin-Schrödinger-Str. Geb. 57, 67633, Kaiserslautern, Germany.
Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Giessen, Germany.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2015 Oct;77(7):2377-98. doi: 10.3758/s13414-015-0923-4.
Rapid motor responses to visual stimuli can involve both the activation and inhibition of motor responses. Here, we trace the early processing dynamics of response generation, examining whether activation and inhibition events form a strict sequence when elicited by sequential stimuli, as we would expect if motor events are driven by fast, stimulus-triggered feedforward sweeps. We employed identical stimuli in two complementary paradigms. In response priming, responses to a target stimulus are speeded or slowed by a masked prime triggering the same or an alternative response, respectively. By prolonging the prime-target interval, the response-priming effect can reverse to form the negative compatibility effect (NCE), especially when the mask contains response-relevant features. We report two experiments in which primed pointing movements going in ten possible directions were measured with response-relevant, response-irrelevant, or no masks interleaved between the primes and targets, while selective visual attention was varied. We showed that in response priming, initial responses are controlled exclusively by the prime. In the NCE, however, even the earliest movement phase is controlled jointly by the prime, mask, and target information, and a massive force in counterdirection to the primed response reverses the priming effects specifically for slow responses. We conclude that response priming reflects a strict sequence of feedforward response activations, whereas the activation/inhibition events in the NCE are not strictly serial, but integrate information from the different stimuli over time. Even though the mask features and visual attention modulate the NCE, its major source is a mask-induced, direction-specific thrust reversal of the initial response.
对视觉刺激的快速运动反应可能涉及运动反应的激活和抑制。在这里，我们追踪反应生成的早期处理动态，研究当由连续刺激引发时，激活和抑制事件是否形成严格的序列，就像我们预期的那样，如果运动事件是由快速的、刺激触发的前馈扫描驱动的。我们在两个互补的范式中使用了相同的刺激。在反应启动中，对目标刺激的反应分别通过触发相同或替代反应的掩蔽启动而加快或减慢。通过延长启动-目标间隔，反应启动效应可以反转形成负相容性效应（NCE），特别是当掩蔽包含与反应相关的特征时。我们报告了两个实验，其中在启动和目标之间插入与反应相关、与反应无关或无掩蔽的情况下，测量了朝十个可能方向进行的启动指向运动，同时改变了选择性视觉注意。我们表明，在反应启动中，初始反应完全由启动控制。然而，在NCE中，即使是最早的运动阶段也由启动、掩蔽和目标信息共同控制，并且与启动反应相反方向的巨大力量专门针对缓慢反应反转启动效应。我们得出结论，反应启动反映了前馈反应激活的严格序列，而NCE中的激活/抑制事件不是严格串行的，而是随着时间整合来自不同刺激的信息。尽管掩蔽特征和视觉注意调节了NCE，但其主要来源是掩蔽诱导的初始反应的方向特异性推力反转。
