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Updated: Aug 12, 2025

A Modified Lean and Release Technique to Emphasize Response Inhibition and Action Selection in Reactive Balance
Published on: March 19, 2020
Action representations in prevention behavior: Evidence from motor execution
Solveig Tonn1, Moritz Schaaf1, Wilfried Kunde1
1Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg, Germany.
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.
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