title: Limits of ideomotor action-outcome acquisition.
abstract: Ideomotor theory proposes that goal-directed action emerges from the implicit, incidental acquisition of bi-directional associations between actions and their outcomes. In line with this idea, a simple two-stage priming paradigm has provided evidence that presentation of outcomes primes previously associated actions. In the current study we compare the standard priming paradigm with two actions and two unique outcomes (Experiment 1) with two more complex, but otherwise identical versions (Experiment 2: two vs. four actions with four outcomes). Our results show stronger evidence of action-outcome learning in the simple compared to the more complex versions. We suggest that, when using the classic two-stage paradigm, action-outcome acquisition is limited to just a few action-outcome associations that can be concurrently learned-at least if learning is not supported by discriminative stimuli and outcomes are not salient or motivationally relevant. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled SI: Prediction and Attention.
authors.affiliation: Addiction Development and Psychopathology (ADAPT) Lab, Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Poppy
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Watson
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Henk
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: van Steenbergen
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Sanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: de Wit
authors.affiliation: Addiction Development and Psychopathology (ADAPT) Lab, Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Reinout W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Wiers
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, The Netherlands. Electronic address: hommel@fsw.leidenuniv.nl.
authors.forename: Bernhard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hommel
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D060865:Repetition Priming; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Goal-directed action; Ideomotor; Outcome-response priming; Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer