Action or attention in social inhibition of return?

When two individuals alternate reaching responses to targets located in a visual display, reaction times are longer when responses are directed to where the co-actor just responded. Although an abundance of work has examined the many characteristics of this phenomenon it is not yet known why the effect occurs. In particular, some authors have argued that action representation mechanisms are central to the effect. However, here we present evidence in support of an account in which the representation of action is not necessary. First, the basic effect occurs even when participants cannot see their co-actor’s movement but, importantly, have their attention shifted to a target side via an attentional cue. Second, its time course is too short-lasting to function effectively as a component of action planning. Finally, unlike other joint action phenomena, the effect is not modulated by higher order mechanisms concerned with the personal attributes of a co-actor. Taken together, these results suggest that this particular joint action phenomenon is due to attentional rather than action mechanisms

Mobilizing cognition for speeded action: try-harder instructions promote motivated readiness in the constant-foreperiod paradigm

We examined the effect of motivational readiness on cognitive performance. An important but still not sufficiently elaborated question is whether individuals can voluntarily increase cognitive efficiency for an impending target event, given sufficient preparation time. Within the framework of the constant-foreperiod design (comparing reaction time performance in blocks of short and long foreperiod intervals, FPs), we examined the effect of an instruction to try harder (instructional cue: standard vs. effort) in a choice-reaction task on performance speed and variability. Proceeding from previous theoretical considerations, we expected the instruction to speed-up processing irrespective of FP length, while error rate should be increased in the short-FP but decreased in the long-FP condition. Overall, the results confirmed this prediction. Importantly, the distributional (ex-Gaussian and delta plot) analysis revealed that the instruction to try harder decreased distributional skewness (i.e., longer percentiles were more affected), indicating that mobilization ensured temporal performance stability (persistence)