A Separate Research Of Movments And Targets In Action-effect Learning In Ideomotor Theory

A framework for action planning, called ideomotor theory, suggests that actions are represented by their perceivable effects. Thus, any activation of the effect image, either endogenously or exogenously, will trigger the corresponding action.We review the history, background and development of ideomotor theory,as well as the contemporary studies relating to ideomotor theory in which researchers have investigated various manipulations of action effects and how those effects acquire discriminative control over the actions. Evidence indicates that the knowledge about the relation between response and effect is still a critical component even when other factors, such as stimulus-response or response-response relations, are controlled.According to ideomotor theory, actions become linked to the sensory feedback they contingently produce, so that anticipating the feedback automatically evokes the action it typically results from. Numerous recent studies have provided evidence in favour of such action-effect learning but left an important issue unresolved. It remains unspecified to what extent action-effect learning is based on associating effect-representations to representations of the performed movements or to representations of the targets at which the behaviour aimed at. Three experiments were designed to clarify his issue. We use additional stimuli that are to be contingently presented after each of the required movements as their arbitrary distal effects. There are two phases in each of our experiments:acquisition phase and test phase. In an acquisition phase, participants learned the contingency between key presses and effect ones. In a following test phase, key-effect and movement-effect relations were orthogonally assessed by changing the hand-key mapping for one half of the participants.Experiment1proved the existing of action-effect learning and compatibility superiority. Experiment2showed precedence for target-effect over movement-effect learning in a forced-choice RT task. In Experiment3, target-effect learning was also shown to influence the outcome of response selection in a freechoice task. Altogether, the data indicate that target-effect associations contribute to the formation of action-effect linkages—provided that targets are contingently related to the effects.