Alina Ahrens, Volker Franz, Jessica Lee and Markus Janczyk
Affiliation: University of Bremen, University of Tübingen, University of Sydney, University of Bremen
The primary discipline of this contribution is psychology. This submission is intended as a poster.
Generalization of action effects in response-effect learning
The ideomotor principle assumes that once an individual learns the association between a response and its effect (i.e., R-E learning), the association can also be used in the reversed direction. In other words, when one intends to achieve a certain effect and hence activates its representation, the corresponding response representation will become activated as well. In everyday life, we often need to generalize knowledge about actions and effects to new similar situations, as effects are rarely exactly identical. However, whether the effect representations implicated in R-E learning generalize to more abstract concepts is a point of discussion in cognitive psychology. While no generalization was reported by studies relying on a free-choice test phase (Eichfelder et al., 2023; Janczyk et al., 2024), Hommel et al. (2003) and Esser et al. (2023) reported evidence for generalization with forced-choice test phases and response times (RTs) as the main dependent variable. However, Sun et al. (2020) did not even observe congruency effects on RTs in two of their experiments with a traditional forced-choice test phase design, but only in an alternative design, where learning and testing occur simultaneously within a trial (Sun et al., 2022). The first part of this contribution discusses these different results coming from different tasks (free- vs. forced-choice). This seems to be important as it was recently questioned whether free-choice test phases are suitable to detect R-E associations at all (Eichfelder et al., 2023; Janczyk et al., 2024; Custer, 2024; Kunde & Janczyk, 2024; Sun et al., 2022). The second part then presents new data from an experiment where we adapted the approach of Sun et al. (2022) to further investigate the generalization of R-E learning with RTs. Participants responded with a left or right key press to the location of a stimulus word, which results in the presentation of an effect word, representing a category (“furniture” or “animal”). In the control group, the stimulus word was one of the effect words (i.e., a category word). In the experimental group, the stimulus words were exemplars from these categories (e.g., “chair” as an exemplar of the category “furniture”). Further, and in opposition to previous experiments, we used multiple (compared with previously only one) exemplars as there is evidence that variability yields more stable category representations (Cohen et al., 2001; Hahn et al., 2005). Against the existing results, using multiple exemplars and using RTs as the dependent variable might be the most promising avenue to provide (more) evidence for generalization of effect representations.
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