Perceiving while acting: action affects perception.
In two experiments we studied how motor responses affect stimulus encoding when stimuli and responses are functionally unrelated and merely overlap in time. Such R-S effects across S-R assignments have been reported by Schubö, Aschersleben, and Prinz (2001), who found that stimulus encoding was affected by concurrent response execution in the sense of a contrast (i.e., emphasizing differences). The present study aimed at elucidating the mechanisms underlying this effect. Experiment 1 studied the time course of the R-S effect. Contrast was only obtained for short intertrial intervals (ITIs). With long ITIs contrast turned into assimilation (i.e., emphasizing similarities). Experiment 2 excluded an interpretation of the assimilation effect in terms of motor repetition. Our findings support the notion of a shared representational domain for perception and action control, and suggest that contrast between stimulus and response codes emerges when two S-R assignments compete with each other in perception. When perceptual competition is over, assimilation emerges in memory.
Schubö
Anna
A
Institut für Psychologie, University of Erlangen, Kochstrasse 4, 91054 Erlangen, Germany. anna.schuboe@rzmail.uni-erlangen.de
Prinz
Wolfgang
W
Aschersleben
Gisa
G
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003118:Color Perception; D005260:Female; D006236:Handwriting; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009039:Motion Perception; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011601:Psychophysics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012193:Reversal Learning; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior