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Explicit knowledge and real-time action control: anticipating a change does not make us respond more quickly.
Brendan D Cameron1, Darian T Cheng, Romeo Chua
1Departament de Psicologia Basica, Universitat de Barcelona, Passeig de la Vall d'Hebron, 171, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. cameronbrendan5@gmail.com
Experimental Brain Research
|January 19, 2013
Summary
Explicit knowledge about target shifts does not speed up automatic reaching responses. However, expectation can suppress these automatic responses, suggesting top-down control primarily inhibits rather than enhances real-time movement.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Motor Control
- Human Movement Science
Background:
- Goal-directed reaching typically involves rapid, automatic responses to target shifts.
- Understanding top-down influences on real-time motor adjustments is crucial for explaining human responsiveness.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether explicit knowledge of target movement likelihood influences the speed and vigor of automatic reaching responses.
- To determine if top-down control can enhance or suppress the onset of automatic motor adjustments during reaching.
Main Methods:
- Participants performed goal-directed reaching tasks with cued probabilities (20-100%) of target perturbations.
- Response latency, vigor, and movement time were measured to assess automatic adjustments.
- Experiment 2 also tested the effect of prior knowledge about perturbation direction.
Main Results:
- Lower likelihood cues (20%) led to later responses, suggesting suppression of automatic adjustments.
- Higher likelihood cues (100%) did not shorten response latency but increased response vigor and reduced movement time.
- Prior knowledge of perturbation direction did not reduce response latency.
Conclusions:
- The onset of automatic reaching responses appears to be suppressible by top-down input, but not augmentable.
- Expectation may modify the forcefulness of automatic responses, but this requires further investigation.
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