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When our actions yield predictable consequences in the environment, our eyes often already saccade towards the locations we expect these consequences to appear at. Such spontaneous anticipatory saccades occur based on bi-directional associations between action and effect formed by prior experience. That is, our eye movements are guided by expectations derived from prior learning history. Anticipatory saccades presumably reflect a proactive effect monitoring process that prepares a later comparison of expected and actual effect. Here, we examined whether anticipatory saccades emerged under forced choice conditions when only actions but not target stimuli were predictive of future effects and whether action mode (forced choice vs. free choice, i.e., stimulus-based vs. stimulus-independent choice) affected proactive effect monitoring. Participants produced predictable visual effects on the left/right side via forced choice and free choice left/right key presses. Action and visual effect were spatially compatible in one half of the experiment and spatially incompatible in the other half. Irrespective of whether effects were predicted by target stimuli in addition to participants' actions, in both action modes, we observed anticipatory saccades towards the location of future effects. Importantly, neither the frequency, nor latency or amplitude of these anticipatory saccades significantly differed between forced choice and free choice action modes. Overall, our findings suggest that proactive effect monitoring of future action consequences, as reflected in anticipatory saccades, is comparable between forced choice and free choice action modes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stimulus–response (S–R) associations consist of two independent components: Stimulus–classification (S–C) and stimulus–action (S–A) associations. Here, we examined whether these S–C and S–A associations were modulated by cognitive control operations. In two item-specific priming experiments, we systematically manipulated the proportion of trials in which item-specific S–C and/or S–A mappings repeated or switched between the single encoding (prime) and single retrieval (probe) instance of each stimulus (i.e., each stimulus appeared only twice). Thus, we assessed the influence of a list-level proportion switch manipulation on the strength of item-specific S–C and S–A associations. Participants responded slower and committed more errors when item-specific S–C or S–A mappings switched rather than repeated between prime and probe (i.e., S–C/S–A switch effects). S–C switch effects were larger when S–C repetitions rather than switches were frequent on the list-level. Similarly, S–A switch effects were modulated by S–A switch proportion. Most importantly, our findings rule out contingency learning and temporal learning as explanations of the observed results and point towards a conflict adaptation mechanism that selectively adapts the encoding and/or retrieval for each S–R component. Finally, we outline how cognitive control over S–R associations operates in the context of item-specific priming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to stimuli leads to the formation of stimulus-response (S-R) associations that allow stimuli to subsequently automatically trigger associated responses. A recent study has shown that S-R associations are established not only by active task execution, but also by the simultaneous presentation of stimuli and verbal codes denoting responses in the absence of own action [Pfeuffer et al. (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 43:328-347, 2017)]. Here, we used an item-specific priming paradigm to investigate whether the stimulus part of S-R associations formed based on task execution and verbal codes is represented in abstract or specific format by examining whether S-R associations are retrieved for perceptually different forms of the same stimulus or not. Between the prime and probe instance of a stimulus, its format switched from image to word or vice versa. We found that, irrespective of whether stimuli were primed by task execution or verbal coding, performance was impaired when S-R mappings switched rather than repeated between the prime and probe instance of a stimulus. The finding that prime S-R mappings affected probe performance even when stimulus format switched indicates that stimuli were represented in abstract form in S-R association based on both task execution and verbal coding. Furthermore, we found no performance benefits for stimuli primed and probed in the same format rather than different formats, suggesting that stimuli were not additionally represented in specific format. Overall, our findings demonstrate the adaptability of automatized behaviors and indicate that abstract stimulus representations allow S-R associations to generalize across perceptually different stimulus formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]