title: When expectancies collide: Action dynamics reveal the interaction between stimulus plausibility and congruency.
abstract: The cognitive architecture routinely relies on expectancy mechanisms to process the plausibility of stimuli and establish their sequential congruency. In two computer mouse-tracking experiments, we use a cross-modal verification task to uncover the interaction between plausibility and congruency by examining their temporal signatures of activation competition as expressed in a computer- mouse movement decision response. In this task, participants verified the content congruency of sentence and scene pairs that varied in plausibility. The order of presentation (sentence-scene, scene-sentence) was varied between participants to uncover any differential processing. Our results show that implausible but congruent stimuli triggered less accurate and slower responses than implausible and incongruent stimuli, and were associated with more complex angular mouse trajectories independent of the order of presentation. This study provides novel evidence of a disassociation between the temporal signatures of plausibility and congruency detection on decision responses.
authors.affiliation: School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, UK. mcoco@staffmail.ed.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Moreno I
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Coco
authors.affiliation: School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arizona State University, Glendale, AZ, 85036, USA.
authors.forename: Nicholas D
authors.initials: ND
authors.lastname: Duran
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Contextual congruency; Cross-modal processing; Event plausibility; Mouse-tracking; Verification task