A Look into the Future: Anticipatory saccades shed light on human action control

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Christina Pfeuffer
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 400343358

In everyday life, humans act goal-directedly without apparent effort. From an infinite number of possible actions, we select exactly the action that will produce a desired effect. Ideomotor theory of endogenous action control addresses the question how humans are able to select appropriate actions to achieve desired effects by suggesting bi-directional associations between actions and their effects in the environment, for instance, between pressing the light switch and the light turning on. Thus, anticipating an effect allows for selecting the associated action that will produce it. The last decades have seen a vast body of research supporting the idea that action effect anticipations enable goal-directed action control by influencing action selection. Interestingly, early ideomotor theorists already proposed a second mechanism central to human action control: Effect monitoring. This claim that humans need to compare expected and actual effects to evaluate goal achievement, however, has received relatively little attention in present research on human action control. Recently, I have developed an eye tracking paradigm that allows for simultaneously assessing processes of anticipatory action selection and proactive effect monitoring. Participants press left/right keys in order to produce predictable visual action effects on the left/right side that occur after a short delay. In this paradigm, processes of anticipatory action selection can be assessed via performance difference between actions that will produce spatially-compatible and spatially-incompatible effects, whereas effect monitoring is assessed via anticipatory saccades towards the predictable future location of an action´s effect that occur before this effect has appeared. Most interestingly, the presence of these anticipatory saccades suggests a proactive effect monitoring process that reflects the expected effects and supports a later comparison of expected and actual effect. Within the scope of this project, I aim to simultaneously and systematically investigate both mechanisms of goal-directed action control - anticipatory action selection and proactive effect monitoring - as well as their interaction to gain a unified framework of action control. I will first examine proactive effect monitoring as reflected in anticipatory saccades more closely under different action control modes. Subsequently, I will systematically investigate which features of a future action effect are proactively monitored to determine the specificity of proactive effect monitoring. Finally, I will study the interaction of anticipatory action selection and proactive effect monitoring processes within a proposed unified model of human endogenous action control.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Lynn Huestegge; Professorin Dr. Andrea Kiesel