Warning signals only support the first action in a sequence

Acting upon target stimuli from the environment becomes faster when the targets are preceded by a warning (alerting) cue. Accordingly, alerting is often used to support action in safety-critical contexts (e.g., honking to alert others of a traffic situation). Crucially, however, the benefits of aler...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2023-05, Vol.8 (1), p.29-29, Article 29
Main Authors: Dietze, Niklas, Recker, Lukas, Poth, Christian H.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Action
Arousal
Arousal Patterns
Attention
Attention Control
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Choice reaction
Cognitive ability
Cognitive control
Cognitive Processes
Cognitive Psychology
Cues
Decision Making
Environmental effects
Experimental Psychology
Humans
Laboratories
Neuropsychological Tests
Neuropsychology
Neurosciences
Original
Original Article
Phasic alertness
Photic Stimulation
Psychological Testing
Psychology
Psychomotor Skills
Pupil
Reaction Time
Sensorimotor system
Stimuli
Trail Making Test
Visual Measures
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Summary:Acting upon target stimuli from the environment becomes faster when the targets are preceded by a warning (alerting) cue. Accordingly, alerting is often used to support action in safety-critical contexts (e.g., honking to alert others of a traffic situation). Crucially, however, the benefits of alerting for action have been established using laboratory tasks assessing only simple choice reactions. Real-world actions are considerably more complex and mainly consist of sensorimotor sequences of several sub-actions. Therefore, it is still unknown if the benefits of alerting for action transfer from simple choice reactions to such sensorimotor sequences. Here, we investigated how alerting affected performance in a sequential action task derived from the Trail-Making-Test, a well-established neuropsychological test of cognitive action control (Experiment 1). In addition to this task, participants performed a classic alerting paradigm including a simple choice reaction task (Experiment 2). Results showed that alerting sped up responding in both tasks, but in the sequential action task, this benefit was restricted to the first action of a sequence. This was the case, even when multiple actions were performed within a short time (Experiment 3), ruling out that the restriction of alerting to the first action was due to its short-lived nature. Taken together, these findings reveal the existence of an interface between phasic alertness and action control that supports the next action.
ISSN:2365-7464
2365-7464
DOI:10.1186/s41235-023-00484-z