A differential impact of action–effect temporal contiguity on different measures of response inhibition in the Go\No-Go and Stop-signal paradigms

TL;DR

This study shows that the timing of action effects influences response inhibition differently in two cognitive tasks, suggesting a role for motor control in suppressing actions.

Contribution

The study reveals that action–effect temporal contiguity enhances response inhibition in Go/No-Go but not in Stop-signal tasks.

Findings

Immediate action–effect reduced response times in both Go/No-Go and Stop-signal tasks.

Immediate action–effect improved response inhibition in Go/No-Go but not in Stop-signal.

Higher error rates were observed in the Immediate condition during Stop-signal trials.

Abstract

Response inhibition refers to suppressing a prepotent motor response and is often studied and discussed as an act of cognitive control. Much less attention was given to the potential contribution of motor control processes to response inhibition. Accumulated empirical findings show that a perceptual effect temporally contiguous with a response improves motor control performance. In the current study, we followed this work by manipulating action–effect temporal contiguity to enhance motor performance and investigated its impact on response selection and inhibition. In two experiments, we integrated a Go/No-Go (GNGT; Experiment 1) and a Stop-signal (SST; Experiment 2) task with the Effect–Motivation task, previously used to capture the facilitating impact of action–effect temporal contiguity on response times (RTs). Replicating previous findings, RTs were shorter following temporally contiguous compared to Lagged action–effect in Go trials in both the GNGT (Experiment 1) and SST (Experiment 2). Notably, an Immediate action–effect improved response inhibition in the GNGT (Experiment 1) but did not modulate Stop-signal reaction time (SSRT) in the SST (Experiment 2). Unexpectedly, the error rate on Go trials was higher in the Immediate effect condition in Experiment 2. We interpret the findings to suggest that an action’s (Immediate) perceptual effect may promote response inhibition performance by enhancing selective association between the Go stimuli and the Go response and not by improving cognitive control ability. The findings also imply that an Immediate action–effect may hamper action control (e.g., by increasing general readiness to respond), at least when action control does not benefit from automatic stimulus–response association.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00426-024-01931-2.

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