Context-specific adaptation for head fakes in basketball: a study on player-specific fake-frequency schedules.

In basketball, an attacking player often plays a pass to one side while looking to the other side. This head fake provokes a conflict in the observing opponent, as the processing of the head orientation interferes with the processing of the pass direction. Accordingly, responses to passes with head fakes are slower and result in more errors than responses to passes without head fakes (head-fake effect). The head-fake effect and structurally similar interference effects (e.g., Stroop effect) are modulated by the frequency of conflicting trials. Previous studies mostly applied a block-wise manipulation of proportion congruency. However, in basketball (and also in other team sports), where different individual opponents can be encountered, it might be important to take the individual frequency (e.g., 20% vs. 80%) of these opponents into account. Therefore, the present study investigates the possibility to quickly (i.e., on a trial-by-trial basis) reconfigure the response behavior to different proportions of incongruent trials, which are contingent on different basketball players. Results point out that participants indeed adapted to the fake-frequency of different basketball players, which could be the result of strategic adaptation processes. Multi-level analyses, however, indicate that a substantial portion of the player-specific adaptation to fake frequencies is accounted by episodic retrieval processes, suggesting that item-specific proportion congruency effects can be explained in terms of stimulus-response binding and retrieval: The head orientation (e.g., to the right) of a current stimulus retrieves the last episode with the same head orientation including the response that was part of this last episode. Thus, from a theoretical perspective, an attacking player would provoke the strongest detrimental effect on an opponent if s/he repeats the same head movement but changes the direction of the pass. Whether it is at all possible to strategically apply this recommendation in practice needs still to be answered.

Perception and action as viewed from the Theory of Event Coding: a multi-lab replication and effect size estimation of common experimental designs.

The Theory of Event Coding (TEC) has influenced research on action and perception across the past two decades. It integrates several seminal empirical phenomena and it has continued to stimulate novel experimental approaches on the representational foundations of action control and perceptual experience. Yet, many of the most notable results surrounding TEC originate from an era of psychological research that relied on rather small sample sizes as judged by today's standards. This state hampers future research aiming to build on previous phenomena. We, therefore, provide a multi-lab re-assessment of the following six classical observations: response-effect compatibility, action-induced blindness, response-effect learning, stimulus-response binding, code occupation, and short-term response-effect binding. Our major goal is to provide precise estimates of corresponding effect sizes to facilitate future scientific endeavors. These effect sizes turned out to be considerably smaller than in the original reports, thus allowing for informed decisions on how to address each phenomenon in future work. Of note, the most relevant results of the original observations were consistently obtained in the present experiments as well.

Emotional arousal does not modulate stimulus-response binding and retrieval effects.

The adaptation-by-binding account and the arousal-biased competition model suggest that emotional arousal increases binding effects for transient links between stimuli and responses. Two highly-powered, pre-registered experiments tested whether transient stimulus-response bindings are stronger for high versus low arousing stimuli. Emotional words were presented in a sequential prime-probe design in which stimulus relation, response relation, and stimulus arousal were orthogonally manipulated. In Experiment 1 (N = 101), words with high and low arousal levels were presented individually in prime and probe displays. In Experiment 2 (N = 170), a high arousing affective word was presented simultaneously with a neutral word during the prime display; in the subsequent probe display, either the arousing or the neutral word repeated or a different high versus low arousal word was shown. Data from both experiments did not demonstrate a modulation of SRBR effects by stimulus arousal and SRBR effects were of equal magnitude for word stimuli of high and low arousal levels. These null results are not in line with binding accounts that hypothesise a modulatory influence of emotional arousal on perception-action binding.

One Link to Link Them All.

A conditioned response to a stimulus can be transferred to an associated stimulus, as seen in sensory preconditioning. In this research paper, we aimed to explore this phenomenon using a stimulus-response contingency learning paradigm using voluntary actions as responses. We conducted two preregistered experiments that explored whether a learned response can be indirectly activated by a stimulus (S1) that was never directly paired with the response itself. Importantly, S1 was previously associated with another stimulus (S2) that was then directly and contingently paired with a response (S2-R contingency). In Experiment 1a, an indirect activation of acquired stimulus-response contingencies was present for audiovisual stimulus pairs wherein the stimulus association resembled a vocabulary learning setup. This result was replicated in Experiment 1b. Additionally, we found that the effect is moderated by having conscious awareness of the S1-S2 association and the S2-R contingency. By demonstrating indirect activation effects for voluntary actions, our findings show that principles of Pavlovian conditioning like sensory preconditioning also apply to contingency learning of stimulus-response relations for operant behavior.

Cling together, swing together? Assessing indirect retrieval of stimulus-response bindings for associated stimuli.

When a stimulus is paired with a response, a stimulus-response (SR) binding (or event file) is formed. Subsequent stimulus repetition retrieves the SR binding from memory, which facilitates (impedes) performance when the same (a different) response is required. We aimed to explore whether indirect retrieval of SR bindings by a newly learnt associated stimulus is possible. Participants first went through a learning task to acquire novel stimulus-stimulus associations. The same stimulus pairs were then presented in a prime-probe task to assess direct and indirect retrieval effects. Participants responded by classifying word color in prime and probe trials. Probe words were either identical to prime words (test for direct retrieval) or corresponded to the associated stimulus (test for indirect retrieval) or were unrelated words (baseline). Independently of word relation, response relation (repetition vs. change) across prime and probe trials was manipulated. In two highly powered preregistered studies (total N = 260) using different types of stimulus associations, we obtained evidence for direct retrieval due to identical word repetition in the probe. Crucially, evidence for indirect retrieval upon presentation of an associated probe word was absent. Controlling for memory of each stimulus-stimulus association did not alter the findings. Our results show that indirect retrieval through newly acquired associations does not occur at the level of SR bindings, at least not for recently acquired stimulus-stimulus associations. Our study illustrates the scope of binding principles and highlights boundary conditions for the stimulus properties that can elicit automatic response retrieval.

Core Mechanisms in Action Control: Binding and Retrieval.

This special collection focuses on action control and its two postulated core processes, namely feature binding and retrieval. Action control is an important topic as humans interact with their environment by means of goal-directed behavior, i.e. by means of actions. Cognitive processes were developed and shaped to enhance preparation, execution, and regulation of action. Therefore, it is the current consensus that cognition serves action. To date, research on human action control is comprised mainly of an abundance of paradigm-specific results and models. To gain a better understanding of action control, an integrative framework was proposed (the BRAC framework - for Binding and Retrieval in Action Control, Frings et al., 2020) that can explain a wide range of findings across different experimental paradigms by assuming two core processes as key functions in action control: feature binding and feature retrieval. In this special collection, 20 articles present and discuss different types of sequential paradigms in terms of this integrative account. This editorial explains the major assumptions of the BRAC framework and provides an integrative overview of the articles that are included in this special collection.

Reluctance against the machine: Retrieval of observational stimulus-response episodes in online settings emerges when interacting with a human, but not with a computer partner.

Observing how another person responds to a stimulus creates stimulus-response (SR) episodes. These can be retrieved from memory on later occasions, which means that observed responses are utilized for regulating one's own actions. Until now, evidence for storage and retrieval of observationally acquired SR episodes was limited to dyadic face-to-face interactions between two partners who respond in an alternating fashion. In two preregistered studies (total N = 252), we demonstrate for the first time that observational SR episodes can also be acquired in online interactions: Robust retrieval effects emerged when observers believe to be interacting with another person. In turn, retrieval effects were absent when observers believe to be interacting with a computer. Our findings show that feature-based binding and retrieval principles are pervasive and also apply to social interactions, even under purely virtual conditions. We discuss implications of our findings for different explanatory accounts of social modulations of automatic imitation.

Retrieval effects of observationally acquired stimulus-response bindings in participants with high and low autistic traits.

The present study sought to use a paradigm that allows the study of mental representations of observed actions. We investigated whether retrieval of observationally acquired stimulus-response bindings are impaired in participants with high (compared with low) autistic traits. In an extreme group comparison, participants with high versus low autistic traits worked through an observational SR binding and a standard SR binding task (to control for general deficits in cognitive performance). As expected, groups did not differ with regard to retrieval of transient bindings between stimuli and self-performed responses (standard SR binding & retrieval effects). Against our expectations, the same was true for the retrieval of observationally acquired SR bindings, which was of comparable magnitude in both high and low autistic trait groups. Bayes Factor analysis indicates that our evidence for this null finding has to be regarded as weak evidence. Our findings provide tentative evidence against the view that imitative effects are reduced (hypo-imitation) or increased (hyper-imitation) when autistic trait expression is high. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Being in the Know: The Role of Awareness and Retrieval of Transient Stimulus-Response Bindings in Selective Contingency Learning.

Previous studies demonstrated that contingency learning can be both (a) unaware (Schmidt et al., 2007), and (b) explained in terms of an automatic retrieval of stimulus-response bindings from the last episode in which the cue stimulus has been presented (Giesen et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2020). We investigated whether learning is selective in a contingency learning paradigm in which pairs of salient and nonsalient cues that were equally predictive of responses to targets (digits) were presented simultaneously. In two pre-registered experiments (total N = 137), we found stronger contingency learning for salient compared to non-salient cues. Transient stimulus-response binding and retrieval processes did not contribute to these selective learning effects in contingency learning, which were instead driven by contingency awareness. Our findings indicate that under conditions of high saliency, contingency learning is mediated by conscious rule detection for which retrieval of transient stimulus-response bindings is irrelevant.

Accounting for Proportion Congruency Effects in the Stroop Task in a Confounded Setup: Retrieval of Stimulus-Response Episodes Explains it All.

Proportion congruency (PC) effects on the strength of distractor interference were investigated in a high-powered (n = 109), pre-registered experiment in which participants had to identify the ink color of color words. Replicating the standard PC effect, Stroop interference was larger in blocks comprising mostly congruent word-color combinations, compared to blocks comprising mostly incongruent trials. These block-level differences in the strength of the Stroop effect were eliminated after controlling for (a) the congruency of the most recent episode in which the current word had been presented ("episodic retrieval of control states"), and also after controlling for (b) the response relation of this episode and the current trial ("episodic response retrieval"). Controlling for the congruency in trial n-1 (congruency sequence effect, CSE), irrespective of word relation did not eliminate the PC effect, nor did controlling for immediate exact and partial repetitions. When predicting PC effects simultaneously by both types of episodic retrieval processes, only episodic response retrieval explained the effect. Our findings attest to the importance of episodic response retrieval processes in explaining the PC effect in Stroop-like tasks in a confounded setup where different processes compete with each, and they speak against explanations in terms of a global adjustment of cognitive control settings or contingency learning under these conditions. The results further support the assumption that the most recent episode in which a stimulus had occurred is crucial for responding in the current trial (the "law of recency"; Giesen et al., 2020).

Not so social after all: Video-based acquisition of observational stimulus-response bindings.

Merely observing how another person responds to a stimulus results in incidental stimulus-response (SR) bindings in memory. These observationally acquired SR bindings can be retrieved on a later occasion. Retrieval will bias current behavioral response tendencies towards re-execution of the observed response. Previous demonstrations of this effect endorsed a dyadic interaction paradigm in which two co-actors respond in alternating fashion. The present paper investigates a video-based version of the observational SR binding task in which videotaped responses are observed on screen. Whereas findings from the dyadic paradigm indicate that retrieval of observationally acquired SR bindings is modulated by social relevance, the video-based paradigm is not influenced by social moderators. Data of four experiments show that manipulations of visual perspective, natural and artificial group membership had no modulatory effect on retrieval of observationally acquired SR bindings in the video-based paradigm. The absence of any socially modulated effect in the video-based paradigm is supported by Bayesian statistics in favor of the null hypothesis. Data from a fifth experiment suggests that observational SR binding and retrieval effects in the video-based paradigm reflect the influence of spatial attention allocated towards response keys of observed responses. Implications for the suitability of both paradigms to study observational learning and joint action phenomena are discussed.

Smaller Than Expected.

In two pre-registered studies, we investigated whether processes of imitative action regulation are facilitated after experiencing an episode of social exclusion. We reasoned that imitative action regulation effects should be more pronounced for participants who were socially excluded, providing them with an "automatic means" to socially reconnect with others. Participants played a virtual ball-tossing game to experimentally induce social exclusion or inclusion experiences. Subsequently, pairs of two participants engaged in an observational stimulus-response (SR) binding paradigm modeled after Giesen et al. (2014): Participants observed color categorization responses in their interaction partner (trialn-1) and then executed (in)compatible responses in the subsequent trial (trialn), with observation and responding occurring in alternation. Stimulus relation (repetition vs. change) from trialn-1 to trialn was orthogonally manipulated. In both studies, stimulus-based retrieval effects of observationally acquired SR bindings were descriptively larger in socially excluded (compared with socially included) participants. However, none of the effects were statistically significant. Even a joint analysis of both experiments did not show the expected modulation. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on social exclusion effects on imitative action regulation processes.

Contingency learning as binding? Testing an exemplar view of the colour-word contingency learning effect.

The learning of contingent regularities between events is fundamental for interacting with our world. We are also heavily influenced by recent experiences, as frequently studied in the stimulus-response binding literature. According to one view ("unitary view"), the learning of regularities across many events and the influence of recent events on current performance can coherently be explained with one high-learning rate memory mechanism. That is, contingency learning effects and binding effects are essentially the same thing, only studied at different timescales. On the other hand, there may be more to a contingency effect than just the summation of the influence of past events (e.g., an additional impact of learned regularities). To test these possibilities, the current report reanalyses a number of datasets from the colour-word contingency learning paradigm. It is shown that the weighted sum of binding effects accumulated across many previous trials (with especially strong influence of very recent events) does explain a large chunk of the contingency effect, but not all of it. In particular, the asymptote towards which the contingency effect decreases by accounting for an increasing number of previous-trial binding effects is robustly above zero. On the other hand, we also observe evidence for higher-order interactions between binding effects at differing lags, suggesting that a mere linear accumulation of binding episodes might underestimate their influence on contingency learning. Accordingly, focusing only on episodic stimulus-response binding effects that are due to the last occurrence of a stimulus rendered contingency learning effects non-significant. Implications for memory models are discussed.

The Law of Recency: An Episodic Stimulus-Response Retrieval Account of Habit Acquisition.

A habit is a regularity in automatic responding to a specific situation. Classical learning psychology explains the emergence of habits by an extended learning history during which the response becomes associated to the situation (learning of stimulus-response associations) as a function of practice ("law of exercise") and/or reinforcement ("law of effect"). In this paper, we propose the "law of recency" as another route to habit acquisition that draws on episodic memory models of automatic response regulation. According to this account, habitual responding results from (a) storing stimulus-response episodes in memory, and (b) retrieving these episodes when encountering the stimulus again. This leads to a reactivation of the response that was bound to the stimulus (c) even in the absence of extended practice and reinforcement. As a measure of habit formation, we used a modified color-word contingency learning (CL) paradigm, in which irrelevant stimulus features (i.e., word meaning) were predictive of the to-be-executed color categorization response. The paradigm we developed allowed us to assess effects of global CL and of an instance-based episodic response retrieval simultaneously within the same experiment. Two experiments revealed robust CL as well as episodic response retrieval effects. Importantly, these effects were not independent: Controlling for response retrieval effects eliminated effects of CL, which supports the claim that habit formation can be mediated by episodic retrieval processes, and that short-term binding effects are not fundamentally separate from long-term learning processes. Our findings have theoretical and practical implications regarding (a) models of long-term learning, and (b) the emergence and change of habitual responding.