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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 12, 2025

A Modified Lean and Release Technique to Emphasize Response Inhibition and Action Selection in Reactive Balance

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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.

|January 29, 2023

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Preventing events involves understanding how to-be-prevented outcomes are mentally represented. This study shows prevention actions, like other actions, rely on anticipating environmental changes.

Keywords:

Action representation Movement trajectories Prevention Response durations

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Area of Science:

Cognitive psychology
Action control
Human behavior

Background:

Human actions can aim to produce or prevent events.
The mental representation of to-be-prevented events is not well understood.
Existing theories suggest prevention actions may not rely on environmental effect codes, unlike operant actions.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying prevention actions.
To determine if to-be-prevented events are represented similarly to to-be-produced effects.
To test whether spatial and temporal features influence prevention actions.

Main Methods:

Two experiments were conducted to examine the influence of event features on action selection.
Experiment 1 focused on spatial features of to-be-prevented events.
Experiment 2 focused on temporal features of to-be-prevented events.

Main Results:

Spatial features of to-be-prevented events influenced actions similarly to to-be-produced effects.
Temporal features of to-be-prevented events also influenced actions comparably to to-be-produced effects.
Both spatial and temporal characteristics of anticipated events guide action.

Conclusions:

Prevention actions rely on anticipating environmental changes, similar to operant actions.
The mental representation of to-be-prevented events involves anticipated environmental outcomes.
Cognitive control of prevention actions is comparable to that of effect-producing actions.