Search

In this project we investigate the impact of stimulus material and stimulus configuration for the choice of action control mode

Starting from research on relations between attachment and the development of self-regulation, the present study aimed to investigate research questions on relations among inhibitory control, internalization of rules of conduct (i.e., behavior regulation, concern occasioned by others transgressions, confession, reparation after wrongdoing), and attachment security. Attachment security and internalization of rules of conduct of German kindergarten children (N = 82) were assessed by maternal reports. Children's inhibitory control was measured with the Stop-task. Regression analyses revealed that inhibitory control was positively related to attachment security and to internalization of rules of conduct. Mediational analysis using a bootstrapping approach indicated an indirect effect of attachment security on internalization processes via inhibitory control. Implications for further research on the development of inhibitory control and internalization of rules of conduct are discussed. ispartof: FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY vol:4 ispartof: location:Switzerland status: published

One of the central processing stages linking perception and action is response selection (e.g. Lien & Proctor, 2002). Response selection can be described as a mechanism translating stimulus into response representations in a way, which allows adaptive behavior with respect to the given situation and the individual goals. In the two studies of this dissertation, a dynamic, control-related (Study I) and a structural, representation-related (Study II) aspect of response selection were studied thoroughly. Therefore, the effects of response category repetitions under task shift conditions were analyzed.In the first study, it should be answered, whether response execution, selection or merely activation in the previous task are necessary for observing the respective repetition effects, and to what extent these effects are modulated by the actual risk of possible accidental response reexecutions. The answers to these questions served to test, whether learning or reconfiguration mechanisms suffice to explain response-only repetition effects, or whether an additional inhibitory control mechanism needs to be assumed. The results of this first study show, that the respective repetition effects a) depend only on response activation processes and b) are modulated by adaptive adjustment mechanisms. These results suggest the assumption of an inhibitory control mechanism, which is triggered by potential response conflicts.The second study focused on the response categories, which are relevant for response selection, and the factors determining the choice of a specific category type. It should be answered, whether the participants represent the responses according to the relevant stimulus dimensions, or according to some abstract, response-immanent features. The results of the second study show that the responses are generally represented according to abstract response features (e.g. index / middle finger). Furthermore, the instructions proved to be crucial as to which of several equally possible category types are indeed used for response representation, but only if the alternative category type (e.g. left / right) is not induced by overlapping implicit stimulus features.Altogether the results of the present studies support a) the notion that response selection consists of several subprocesses (automatic response activation, intentional S-R-translation and control mechanisms) and b) models postulating an additional layer of abstract response categories besides the stimulus category layer (e.g. Zhang, Zhang & Kornblum, 1999).

Repetition effects are often viewed as informative regarding the cognitive mechanisms of action control. One particular finding, namely costs for repeating the same response in subsequent trials, especially challenges theorizing. Costs for response repetitions have recently been reported in task-switch studies on task-switch trials (whereas benefits usually arise in task-repetition trials), but also in some choice-RT task studies. In three experiments, two of the most successful accounts for the response-repetition costs in choice-RT task studies and task switching were tested: an expectancy-based explanation, and an inhibition-based account. Using a choice-RT task introduced by Smith (1968) and manipulating the response-stimulus interval (RSI) and the categorizability of the stimuli, some specific predictions of the two accounts were tested. The results clearly revealed that expectancy-based explanations fail to account for the observed patterns of effects, whereas they are well in line with the predictions from the inhibition-based account. Finally, the results are further discussed with respect to alternative accounts from the field of task switching.

One of the proposed mechanisms for sequential control in task-shift conditions is backward inhibition (BI), which is usually measured in terms of lag-2 task repetition costs in A-B-A task sequences relative to C-B-A task sequences. By considering the so far existing experiments it seems that these lag-2 repetition costs occur only with temporally overlapping cues and targets. In the present study this issue was further examined in two experiments, in which temporal cue-target overlap was varied blockwise (Experiment 1) and from trial-to-trial (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 shows that lag-2 repetition effects can only be observed with temporally overlapping cues and targets, indicating that there was no BI with temporally separated cues and targets. However, the results of Experiment 2 suggest that both irrelevant task sets are inhibited in this case, and that with temporally overlapping cues and targets only the previously relevant task set is inhibited.