Recent evidence suggests that ideomotor effect anticipations rely on transitions rather than end-states. That is, humans generate motor actions not by anticipating a desired end-state, but by anticipating the change from the current situation to that desired end-state. Here, we tested whether ideomotor learning mechanisms mirror this sensitivity to transitions. To this end, we conducted three preregistered experiments employing a prime-probe design. In the prime, an action produced a visual effect. In the subsequent probe, the stimulus always either matched or mismatched this previously produced end-state. Crucially, the probe stimulus either involved the same transition of producing a novel stimulus (onset stimuli) or, alternatively, it involved only the same end-state, but a different transition resulting in that end-state (offset stimuli). Evidence for action-effect binding as a precursor of ideomotor learning emerged only when the probe transition repeated the prime transition. This suggests that ideomotor learning is mainly sensitive to transitions rather than end-states.

How are motor activities linked to their perceptual outcomes? We here test the idea that the storage and retrieval of action-effect linkages is subject to constraints of associative memory. Specifically, we argue that mutual interference between such linkages should favor the storage and retrieval of unique (one-to-one) action-effect linkages as compared to overlapping (one-to-many) action-effect linkages (uniqueness effect). Moreover, we assume that increasing the number of repetitions of action-effect episodes facilitates learning and is modulated by this uniqueness effect. In three experiments, participants first produced certain visual effects through motor activities, and were later asked to retrieve the activity that had produced a certain probed visual effect before. For the most part, retrieval performance increased with unique as compared to overlapping action-effect linkages and with increasing number of action-effect repetitions, while repetition had a slightly larger influence with unique as compared to overlapping action-effect linkages. We discuss these results against the backdrop of associative and episodic retrieval accounts of learning.

When body movements are transformed into somewhat discrepant effects in the environment, agents are surprisingly unaware of what their body is doing exactly (e.g., Knoblich and Kircher 2004; Fourneret and Jeannerod 1998; Sutter et al. 2008). Presumably, that is because agents control such movements primarily via their transformed visual effects while downregulating the processing of haptic movement effects (for a review, see Sutter et al. 2013). In two experiments, we measured tactile sensitivity on the moving effector as a proxy for the up- or downregulation of processing haptic effects during continuous visuo-motor congruent or incongruent tool transformations. As expected, tactile sensitivity was modulated by incongruency, but only when individuals became aware of it. Awareness came with an increase in tactile sensitivity, suggesting that haptic processing is upregulated once agents notice that their movements are not congruent with intended visual effects. These findings challenge the presumed dominance of environment-related action consequences in movement control, demonstrating the breakthrough of tactile perception in case of visuo-haptic incongruency.

Chess is a universally known game of logic and strategy and has served as a hallmark not only for human, but also artificial intelligence. However, transitioning the game to the digital age has introduced multiple options and opinions on how a chess board should be displayed on computer screens. Here, we ask whether presenting a chess layout from above in 2D or from a player’s perspective in 3D impacts processing of the displayed positions. In a high-powered online study, we found that check and non-check positions were discriminated faster when presented in 2D rather than in 3D mode. As participants overwhelmingly reported more familiarity with 2D settings, we argue that this advantage is consistent with training effects. Moreover, this advantage was largely independent of the temporal overlap with performing another unrelated reaction task, which suggests that the 3D disadvantage arises from a lengthening of capacity-limited information processing stages. Indeed, a more fine-grained analysis implied more pronounced training effects at processing 3D stimuli, hinting at yet underexplored potential for this representation mode.

Because prevention actions result in the non-occurrence of certain events, it is rather unclear how action-event linkages can emerge for these action types. Here, we investigated whether verbal instructions alone can establish such linkages and how they influence behavior. Therefore, participants had to memorize propositional knowledge about prevention actions, and we tested how actions in a subsequent, unrelated task were impacted by this knowledge. Our results demonstrate that actions were facilitated by the very event they are known to prevent, not by the absence of this event. Thus, these action-event linkages were both (a) 'propositional', as they were established by verbal instructions alone, and also (b) 'associative', as they impacted behavior akin to unqualified, bidirectional associations.

Cognition and affect are closely intertwined: identifying a task-relevant object can elicit positive affect, and successfully solving the associated task can enhance it further. Beyond stimulus-driven processing, theories of proactive control and predictive coding suggest that task-related cognition already unfolds before stimulus onset. We propose that such preparatory processes shape affective responses to task completion. In preregistered Experiment 1, participants categorized digit pairs as either “match” (e.g., 3 and 3) or “sequence” (e.g., 3 and 4). Affective responses were assessed via affective priming. Surveys indicated that most participants prepared for matches (“match seekers”), thus implicitly recoding sequences to “no match.” As predicted, correct responses to matches were faster and more positively valenced than responses to sequences. This pattern reversed for the subsample that prepared for sequences (“sequence seekers”). When participants were asked to categorize digits by color—which rendered preparatory processing for matches or sequences task-irrelevant—no affective differences emerged. In Experiment 2, we manipulated preparatory processing via instructions and response categories. Again, match seekers showed an affective advantage for matches, sequence seekers for sequences. Taken together, our findings imply that to understand affective responses to task completions, it is imperative to understand the preparatory processes the performer engaged in.

Error commission is accompanied by a cascade of cognitive processes. In current views, these processes change the activation of all task-related responses in the same way (e.g., via generalized inhibition or a shift toward a more conservative response criterion). Using a three-choice task, we contrasted such response-general processes with putative response-specific processes, which are not sufficiently incorporated into contemporary views. We hypothesized that response-specific processes influence both the correct response and the erroneous response but not a third (i.e., neutral) response. To test this hypothesis, we assessed the activation of these three responses throughout the task using finger force and/or standard keypresses. Replicating prior findings, we observed evidence that response-specific processes attempt to cancel and correct the execution of hastily initiated errors. Crucially, analyses of performance in posterror trials showed that both the correct response and the erroneous response from the previous error trial were more active than the neutral response. These novel findings suggest that response-specific processes explain critical aspects of posterror performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning how actions change the environment is crucial for goal-directed actions and skill acquisition. Here we applied a process dissociation approach to investigate the contribution of explicit and implicit memory to the learning of action-effect relations across four experiments. Participants produced object images by pressing one of two keys, with each action-effect episode experienced three times. Learning was either incidental (Experiments 1-2) or intentional (Experiments 2-4) and occurred under full (Experiments 1-4) or divided (Experiments 3-4) attention. In a test phase, participants were re-presented the effect images and asked to either reproduce or alternate the action that had produced them. Results obtained through cognitive modeling revealed that action-effect relations are primarily represented in explicit memory, with minimal contributions of implicit memory. Intentional learning enhanced memory compared to incidental learning, while divided attention during encoding reduced it, with these factors mainly affecting explicit memory. These findings elucidate the mechanisms underlying skill acquisition and provide insights into the representational nature of action-effect relations.

Our actions often evoke foreseeable behavioral responses in others. For instance, fixating an object can trigger another person to look toward the same location. Ideomotor frameworks assume that one's own actions are initiated by anticipating this evoked behavior of another person. However, in gaze leading situations, a partner’s gaze following is initially discernible only peripherally, raising the question of whether corresponding anticipations still affect the gaze leader’s eye movements. This potentially important mechanism underlying gaze interaction has not yet been explicitly examined. We conducted two experiments using a novel adaptation of the response-effect compatibility (REC) paradigm. Within a card-game cheating scenario, participants performed a saccade to one of two target objects (card decks). Contingent upon this saccade, an on-screen face foreseeably looked to the same object (compatible) or to the opposite side (incompatible), a perceptual consequence of the participant’s saccade that was initially only detectable in peripheral vision. Crucially, participants initiated saccades significantly faster in the compatible compared to the incompatible condition, but only in an experimental setting without additional constraints preventing direct fixation of the action effect. This suggests that participants anticipated their (virtual) partner’s gaze responses, which in turn either facilitated or hampered the production of their own eye movements. This finding aligns with the idea that basic ideomotor processes also underlie social gaze leading/following scenarios. Consistent with previous REC studies in the non-social domain, the results also indicate that the effect is sensitive to specific experimental settings and may disappear when cognitive demands are too high or when the interaction situation is less realistic.

To be able to predict something means to generate reliable expectations about unknown cases based on data or models. To be able to explain a psychological phenomenon means to reconstruct the mental mechanisms and representations that produce it. In the context of AI and psychology, these two capacities are often conflated. We argue: prediction is not explanation—and uncovering the underlying cognitive processes and structures must remain the central goal of psychology, despite the successes of generative AI models in some behavioral prediction tasks.

The ideomotor principle holds that actions can be initiated by anticipating their perceptual effects. While recent work suggests that effect anticipations rely on transitions rather than end-states, this has been shown only for visual effects. Here, we extended present approaches by investigating tactile effects. In two experiments, keypresses stopped vibrations on either the same (transition-compatible) or opposite (transition-incompatible) key, and we varied the task relevance of these effects. In Experiment 1 (task-irrelevant effects), compatibility influenced neither response times nor error rates. In Experiment 2 (task-relevant effects), response times were still not significantly influenced, but the error rates provided subtle evidence for transitional representations of tactile action effects. Our results not only challenge the predominant assumption of state-based effect representations but also provide insights for the temporal analysis of action effect structures and relate ideomotor learning to theories of optimal Bayesian integration.

Bayes-factor analysis becomes increasingly popular, among other reasons, because it allows to provide evidence for the null hypothesis which is not easily possible with the traditional frequentist approach. A conceivable strategy that apparently takes favorable aspects of both approaches on board, is to use traditional frequentist analyses first, and to support theoretically interesting nil effects by Bayesian analyses thereafter. Here we asked whether such a selective application of Bayesian analyses to only non-significant effects of foregoing frequentist analyses creates bias. In two simulation studies we observed that such selective application of Bayesian analyses in fact severely overestimates evidence in favor of the null hypotheses, when a true population effect exists. While this bias can be attenuated by using more informative priors in the Bayesian analyses, we recommend to not apply such selective combination of analytical approaches but instead to use either frequentist or Bayesian analyses consistently.

In two preregistered experiments (total n = 180), we investigated how the valence of experienced and anticipated action effects influences episodic binding and retrieval effects. Participants responded to the colour of words, and responses were followed by a positive or negative audio-visual effect that was already announced by a cue at the beginning of each trial. Dissecting all trials into prime-probe dyads revealed that the anticipated effect valence in the probe retrieved prime responses that had previously produced an effect of the same valence. Not only the bottom-up perception of the valence cue, but also the anticipation of an effect valence contributed to this retrieval. A repetition of the word identity (distractor) also led to retrieval of the prime response (but not of the effect valence). Distractor-response retrieval effects, however, were (a) not enhanced when having experienced a positive effect after a previous prime response, (b) not enhanced when anticipating a positive probe effect, and (c) not consistently enhanced when anticipating an effect matching the one of the to-be retrieved response, indicating that binding and retrieval operate independently of affective consequences. Our findings align with the idea of binary bindings between distractors and responses, as well as between responses and effect valences.

Over the past quarter century, the field of infant motor development has undergone a profound conceptual shift from viewing motor behavior as a biologically preprogrammed sequence to understanding it as a dynamic, emergent process shaped by interaction, feedback, and prediction. This review traces that evolution across three key eras: the rise of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) in the 2000s, which emphasized real-time coordination across bodily and environmental systems, the developmental cascades framework of the 2010s, which demonstrated how early motor milestones shape broader developmental trajectories, and the emergence of predictive, mechanistic models in the 2020 s, inspired by advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. Building on this trajectory, we propose a unifying framework termed Reinforcement from Sensorimotor Predictability (RSP, which posits that infants repeat actions not because they are goal-directed, but because those actions produce consistent and expected feedback. We present preliminary findings from a gaze-contingent eye-tracking study, along with a large-scale longitudinal project that applies machine learning to track sensorimotor trajectories in early infancy. Together, these lines of work suggest that predictability itself may serve as an intrinsic reinforcer, thus laying the groundwork for learning, agency, and the emergence of intentional behavior.

The sense of agency (SoA) denotes an agent's impression of controlling environmental outcomes through acting. Most theoretical approaches assume that matching predicted and actual perceptual feedback from actions creates SoA (comparator model). We propose, however, a simpler ideomotor mechanism, which proposes SoA to emerge from matching perceptual feedback to action goals. In two experiments, participants aimed at target areas on a screen and received manipulated visual feedback. The two models predict different SoA magnitudes based on the appropriateness of the executed motor activity for achieving the goal and the intendedness of the obtained feedback. In line with the ideomotor model, but contrary to the comparator model, SoA was determined solely by the match of feedback to the goal, regardless of motor activity appropriateness. This suggests that assumptions of the comparator model should be reconsidered, specifically, that predictions do not have to be assumed to explain the emergence of SoA.

The error-related negativity (ERN) is a classic electrophysiological index of error detection. However, the present study challenges its classical functional interpretation by analyzing the ERN relative to the termination of erroneous actions (response offsets), a behavioral marker of error cancellation. Our findings reveal that the ERN reflects immediate auto-cancellation of ongoing erroneous behavior. Specifically, our findings corroborate that erroneous responses come with significantly shortened response durations (RDs) compared to correct responses, pointing to an immediate and active cancellation of ongoing motor activity. Crucially, ERN amplitude and latency varied with RDs, indicating that the ERN may reflect not only passive error detection but also the autonomous implementation of corrective behavior. These observations portray human performance monitoring as consisting of two components: a passive component related to detecting action slips, and an active component related to the implementation of behavioral changes. Moreover, these results carry important clinical implications. Abnormal ERN patterns observed in conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and Parkinson's disease may stem not solely from impaired error detection but from disrupted regulation and cancellation of erroneous actions. By integrating behavioral dynamics with electrophysiological measures, our study highlights the need to reconsider the functional significance of the ERN in both cognitive neuroscience and clinical contexts.

We interact with our environment through our actions, sampling information from environmental effects following them. Here, we asked how control over action and ensuing effects influences long-term memory for the effect content and the actions that produced them. In three experiments, participants carried out spatial actions, which produced the movement of a box wherein an image was presented. The box either moved spatially congruent or incongruent with the participants' action. Memory for images was later tested in a recognition test, and we additionally probed whether participants retrieved the action used to produce an image when being cued with said image. In a fourth experiment, we kept the spatial effect component constant to directly investigate bindings between action and effect features. We found evidence for a facilitating influence of congruency on declarative memory for effect content and on action retrieval by perceived effect content. Moreover, if effect content was enriched with a spatial feature, such retrieval was only observed if that feature was spatially congruent rather than incongruent to the action that had produced that content. Thus, features of a single action-effect episode can be integrated and represented in long-term memory, and the formation of these representations is facilitated by control. We propose that feature bindings can be conceptualized as source memory, representing how environmental effects were produced. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Minimizing effort is a principle widely accepted to govern human behavior. We revisited this principle in an extended rotation paradigm. Participants freely chose to solve an object comparison task by either mental or manual rotation of one of two simultaneously presented objects. We manipulated the required force of manual rotation, stimulus complexity, as well as the angular mismatch between both objects, while carefully eliminating confounds of physical effort with time. Our study revealed that both physical and mental effort affect strategy choice. Additionally, strategy choice in a certain trial was influenced by error commissions in the previous trial. These error-induced strategy switches were asymmetric: participants were more inclined to switch following mental than manual rotation errors. Our results suggest that human reactions to error commission when using external tools may differ in a qualitative manner from reactions to error commission during mental endeavors. Theoretical implications are discussed especially in the context of the entanglement of physical effort and time. Humans possess the ability to solve problems using either mainly mental or physical resources. For example, objects can be rotated in the mind or physically. Here, we show that when comparing the effort associated with both means, they are both considered for decision making. Furthermore, making a mistake seems to evoke different reactions depending on the means with which the error was made. Considering such different costs and benefits is vital for both designing and working in tech-infused environments that support problem solving.

This survey study evaluates how perceptions of physicians’ competence, trustworthiness, and empathy vary based on physician use or nonuse of artificial intelligence (AI).