Palenciano Ana F, González-García Carlos, de Houwer Jan, Brass Marcel, Liefooghe Baptist
Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.
J Cogn. 2021 Sep 27;4(1):57. doi: 10.5334/joc.190. eCollection 2021.
Our ability to generate efficient behavior from novel instructions is critical for our adaptation to changing environments. Despite the absence of previous experience, novel instructed content is quickly encoded into an action-based or procedural format, facilitating automatic task processing. In the current work, we investigated the link between proceduralization and motor simulation, specifically, whether the covert activation of the task-relevant responses is used during the assembly of action-based instructions representations. Across three online experiments, we used a concurrent finger-tapping task to block motor simulation during the encoding of novel stimulus-response (S-R) associations. The overlap between the mappings and the motor task at the response level was manipulated. We predicted a greater impairment at mapping implementation in the overlapping condition, where the mappings' relevant response representations were already loaded by the motor demands, and thus, could not be used in the upcoming task simulation. This hypothesis was robustly supported by the three datasets. Nonetheless, the overlapping effect was not modulated by further manipulations of proceduralization-related variables (preparation demands in Exp.2, mapping novelty in Exp.3). Importantly, a fourth control experiment ruled out that our results were driven by alternative accounts as fatigue or negative priming. Overall, we provided strong evidence towards the involvement of motor simulation during anticipatory task reconfiguration. However, this involvement was rather general, and not restricted to novelty scenarios. Finally, these findings can be also integrated into broader models of anticipatory task control, stressing the role of the motor system during preparation.
我们根据新指令生成有效行为的能力对于我们适应不断变化的环境至关重要。尽管缺乏先前的经验，但新的指令内容会迅速被编码为基于动作或程序的格式，从而促进自动任务处理。在当前的研究中，我们调查了程序化与运动模拟之间的联系，具体而言，在基于动作的指令表征的组装过程中是否会使用与任务相关反应的隐蔽激活。在三项在线实验中，我们使用了一个并发的手指敲击任务来在新刺激-反应（S-R）关联的编码过程中阻断运动模拟。在反应水平上，操纵了映射与运动任务之间的重叠。我们预测，在重叠条件下映射实施会受到更大的损害，在这种情况下，映射的相关反应表征已经被运动需求所加载，因此无法用于即将到来的任务模拟。这一假设得到了三个数据集的有力支持。尽管如此，重叠效应并未因与程序化相关变量的进一步操纵（实验2中的准备需求，实验3中的映射新颖性）而受到调节。重要的是，第四个对照实验排除了我们的结果是由疲劳或负启动等其他因素驱动的可能性。总体而言，我们提供了有力证据表明运动模拟在预期任务重新配置过程中发挥了作用。然而，这种作用相当普遍，并不局限于新颖的情境。最后，这些发现也可以整合到更广泛的预期任务控制模型中，强调运动系统在准备过程中的作用。
