Citation

Hervault M, Huys R, Buisson JC, Francheteau M, Siguier P, Zanone PG. Acta Psychol. 2021; 217: 103332.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103332

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In order to ponder how adaptive behavior and its underlying executive processes are, a central criterion in psychology is the extent to which experimental findings generalize across response types. The latency of two major acts of control, action initiation and inhibition, was evaluated using a stop-signal paradigm with two response types, involving either a finger key-press or a wrist pen-swipe response. In both conditions, 40 participants were instructed to respond quickly to a GO stimulus but to cancel their responses when a STOP signal was presented, which occurred randomly in 25% of the trials. Taken together, analyses of reaction times and of inhibition probability functions indicated that action initiation generalized across the two response types. In contrast, the finger key-press and the wrist pen-swipe responses involved independent inhibition processes. These results challenge a strictly top-down view for some acts of control by showing an interaction between the executive and motor levels in terms of response modality specificity.

Language: en

Keywords

Reaction time; Executive functions; Inhibitory control; Motor control; Response type