Li Yansong, Liu Cuihong, Elliot Andrew J
Reward, Competition and Social Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China.
Sichuan Key Laboratory of Psychology and Behavior of Discipline Inspection and Supervision, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, 610066, China.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Jun;32(3):1254-1263. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02606-0. Epub 2024 Nov 4.
The present experiment examined how individuals' motor response execution and inhibition - as measured by a Go/No-Go (GNG) task - is modulated by social influence arising from competition. We found that participants in a competition group responded significantly faster to frequently occurring Go stimuli than those in a control group, while no between-group difference in accuracy was found. This indicates that competition leads participants to favor a response strategy of maximizing the speed of prepotent motor response execution without sacrificing accuracy. In addition, participants in the competition group committed significantly more errors to infrequently occurring No-Go stimuli than those in the control group. Together, these findings suggest that competition speeds up prepotent motor response execution, which comes at the cost of reduced prepotent response inhibition. Furthermore, increased errors in prepotent response inhibition due to competition correlated positively with self-reported trait competitiveness and trait motor impulsivity, identifying the link between personality traits and competition-induced attenuation of inhibition efficiency. Our signal detection analysis revealed that these behavioral effects can be attributed to a combination of a pronounced tendency to respond in general to both Go stimuli and No-Go stimuli, as evidenced by increased response bias (C), and reduced discrimination of No-Go stimuli from Go stimuli, as indexed by decreased sensitivity (d'). Our experiment offers novel insights into how motor control is modulated by engaging in competition.
本实验研究了个体的运动反应执行与抑制（通过“是/否”（Go/No-Go，GNG）任务来衡量）是如何受到竞争产生的社会影响所调节的。我们发现，竞争组的参与者对频繁出现的“是”刺激的反应明显快于对照组的参与者，而在准确性方面未发现组间差异。这表明竞争促使参与者倾向于采用一种在不牺牲准确性的情况下最大化优势运动反应执行速度的反应策略。此外，竞争组的参与者对不常出现的“否”刺激所犯的错误明显多于对照组的参与者。综合来看，这些发现表明竞争加快了优势运动反应的执行速度，但其代价是优势反应抑制的减弱。此外，由于竞争导致的优势反应抑制错误增加与自我报告的特质竞争力和特质运动冲动性呈正相关，这确定了人格特质与竞争引起的抑制效率衰减之间的联系。我们的信号检测分析表明，这些行为效应可归因于对“是”刺激和“否”刺激普遍存在的明显反应倾向（表现为反应偏差（C）增加）与从“是”刺激中区分“否”刺激的能力下降（以敏感性（d'）降低为指标）的综合作用。我们的实验为参与竞争如何调节运动控制提供了新的见解。
