Warning signals only support the first action in a sequence

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications

Original Article

Lukas Recker¹  Christian H. Poth¹  Niklas Dietze¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology, Neuro-Cognitive Psychology and Center for Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University, P.O. box 10 01 31, 33501, Bielefeld, Germany;

关键词: Phasic alertness;    Action;    Cognitive control;    Arousal;    Pupil;    Choice reaction;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s41235-023-00484-z

 received in 2022-12-15, accepted in 2023-04-30,  发布年份 2023

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

Acting upon target stimuli from the environment becomes faster when the targets are preceded by a warning (alerting) cue. Accordingly, alerting is often used to support action in safety-critical contexts (e.g., honking to alert others of a traffic situation). Crucially, however, the benefits of alerting for action have been established using laboratory tasks assessing only simple choice reactions. Real-world actions are considerably more complex and mainly consist of sensorimotor sequences of several sub-actions. Therefore, it is still unknown if the benefits of alerting for action transfer from simple choice reactions to such sensorimotor sequences. Here, we investigated how alerting affected performance in a sequential action task derived from the Trail-Making-Test, a well-established neuropsychological test of cognitive action control (Experiment 1). In addition to this task, participants performed a classic alerting paradigm including a simple choice reaction task (Experiment 2). Results showed that alerting sped up responding in both tasks, but in the sequential action task, this benefit was restricted to the first action of a sequence. This was the case, even when multiple actions were performed within a short time (Experiment 3), ruling out that the restriction of alerting to the first action was due to its short-lived nature. Taken together, these findings reveal the existence of an interface between phasic alertness and action control that supports the next action.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2023

【 图 表 】

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