A systematic breakdown of stimulus-response associations

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Andrea Kiesel
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 246452673

• Final Report Year: 2018

Final Report Abstract

Overall, the studies conducted within the scope of the present ANR-DFG proposal demonstrate remarkable similarities between instruction-based and execution-based S-A and S-C associations. Both S-R associations formed on the basis of active task execution as well as S-R associations formed on the basis of mere instruction were temporally stable, resistant against overwriting, similarly affected by top-down control processes, and incorporated abstract stimulus representations. Nevertheless, there was a crucial difference between instruction-based and execution-based S-R associations. Whereas execution-based S-R associations benefitted from repeated priming, no such effect was observed for instructionbased S-R associations. These findings suggest differences regarding how execution-based and instruction-based S-R associations are stored in and retrieved from memory. We further suggest that differences regarding the degree of transfer-appropriateness of acquisition and test settings might at least partly account for the observed differences. Thus, we suggest that further research on the representation of execution-based and instruction-based S-R associations in memory as well as on the role of transfer-appropriateness would be a promising line of future research. Furthermore, we provided first evidence for the contextspecificity of execution-based S-A associations. Here, further research is necessary to address the context-specificity of S-C associations as well as instruction-based S-A and S-C associations. Finally, we demonstrate that top-down processes can affect the encoding and/or retrieval of S-A and S-C associations. This is a further interesting line of research that opens new possibilities for researching the influence of higher order top-down processes on rather simplistic bottom-up processes like S-R retrieval which are fundamental building blocks of human action control.

Publications

• (2017). The Power of Words: On item-specific stimulus-response associations formed in the absence of action. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43, 328-347
  Pfeuffer, C. U., Moutsopoulou, K., Pfister, R., Waszak, F., & Kiesel, A.
  
• (2017, online first). Defining Stimulus Representation in Stimulus-Response Associations Formed on the Basis of Task Execution and Verbal Codes. Psychological Research
  Pfeuffer, C. U., Hosp, T., Kimmig, E., Moutsopoulou, K., Waszak, F., & Kiesel, A.
  
• (2018). Multiple Priming Instances Increase the Impact of Practice-based but not Verbal Code-based Stimulus-Response Associations. Acta Psychologica, 184, 100-109
  Pfeuffer, C. U., Moutsopoulou, K., Waszak, F., & Kiesel, A.