Citation

Tonn S, Schaaf M, Kunde W, Pfister R. Cognition 2023; 234: e105370.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105370

PMID

36709620

Abstract

Human actions sometimes aim at preventing an event from occurring. How these to-be-prevented events are represented, however, is poorly understood. Recent proposals in the literature point to a possible divide between effect-producing, operant actions, and effect-precluding, prevention actions, suggesting that the control of operant actions relies on codes of environment-related effects whereas prevention actions do not. Here we report two experiments on this issue, showing that spatial features (Experiment 1) as well as temporal features (Experiment 2) of to-be-prevented events influence actions in the same way as corresponding features of to-be-produced effects. This implies that selecting and executing prevention actions relies on anticipated environmental changes, comparable to operant actions.

Language: en

Keywords

Prevention; Action representation; Movement trajectories; Response durations