@article{ref1,
title="Warning signals only support the first action in a sequence",
journal="Cognitive research: principles and implications",
year="2023",
author="Dietze, Niklas and Recker, Lukas and Poth, Christian H.",
volume="8",
number="1",
pages="e29-e29",
abstract="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). <br><br>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.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="2365-7464",
doi="10.1186/s41235-023-00484-z",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41235-023-00484-z"
}