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Human actions sometimes aim at preventing an event from occurring. How these to-be-prevented events are represented, however, is poorly understood. Recent proposals in the literature point to a possible divide between effect-producing, operant actions, and effect-precluding, prevention actions, suggesting that the control of operant actions relies on codes of environment-related effects whereas prevention actions do not. Here we report two experiments on this issue, showing that spatial features (Experiment 1) as well as temporal features (Experiment 2) of to-be-prevented events influence actions in the same way as corresponding features of to-be-produced effects. This implies that selecting and executing prevention actions relies on anticipated environmental changes, comparable to operant actions., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest None., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Human agents draw on a variety of explicit and implicit cues to construct a sense of agency for their actions and the effects of these actions on the outside world. Associative mechanisms binding actions to their immediate effects support the evolution of agency for operant actions. However, human agents often also act to prevent a certain event from occurring. Such prevention behavior poses a critical challenge for the sense of agency, as successful prevention inherently revolves around the absence of a perceivable effect. By assessing the psychological microstructure of singular operant and prevention actions we show that this comes with profound consequences: agency for prevention actions is only evident in explicit measures but not in corresponding implicit proxies. These findings attest to an altered action representation in prevention behavior and they support recent proposals to model related processes such as avoidance learning in terms of propositional rather than associative terms., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)