Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Eitam et al. (2013) reported that immediate feedback to response could motivate the same response in the followingtrials. They suggested action-effects could have a value as information on control over the environment, resulting inthe response facilitation. However, the underlying mechanism of such faciliatory effects, what particular processes action-effects reinforce, remains unclear. Therefore, we investigated whether the response facilitation depends on actions, stimuli,or stimulus-response relationship. Participants were required to select adequate responses in accordance with the stimulias response cue. The action-effects depended on the combination of stimuli and responses; immediate and lagged effectscould be predicted by the stimulus, but shared the same response button. Results showed that the response was executedfaster when driven by stimuli associated with immediate effects than those associated with lagged effects. This indicatesthat immediate action-effects might facilitate response via stimuli-response association, but not via independent processesof actions or stimuli.