The foreperiod effect revisited: conditioning as a basis for nonspecific preparation

The foreperiod (FP) is the interval between a warning stimulus and the imperative stimulus. It is a classical finding that both the duration and the intertrial variability of FP considerably affects response time. These effects are invariably attributed to the participant's state of nonspecific preparation at the moment the imperative stimulus is presented. In this article, we examined a proposal by Los, S. A. (1996) [On the origin of mixing costs: exploring information processing in pure and mixed blocks of trials. Acta Psychologica, 94, 145-188] that the real-time development of nonspecific preparation during FP relies on the same principle as trace conditioning. To this end, we adjusted the formal conditioning model developed by Machado, A. (1997) [Learning the temporal dynamics of behavior. Psychological Review, 104 (2), 241-265], and fitted this model to a representative data set we obtained from nine participants. Although the model accounted for only a moderate proportion of the variance, it accurately reproduced several key features of the data. We therefore concluded that the model is a promising first step toward a theory of nonspecific preparation.