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Psychological Bulletin 2010, Vol. 136, No.

6, 943974

2010 American Psychological Association 0033-2909/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0020541

A Review of Contemporary Ideomotor Theory


Yun Kyoung Shin, Robert W. Proctor, and E. J. Capaldi
Purdue University
A framework for action planning, called ideomotor theory, suggests that actions are represented by their perceivable effects. Thus, any activation of the effect image, either endogenously or exogenously, will trigger the corresponding action. We review contemporary studies relating to ideomotor theory in which researchers have investigated various manipulations of action effects and how those effects acquire discriminative control over the actions. Evidence indicates that the knowledge about the relation between response and effect is still a critical component even when other factors, such as stimulusresponse or responseresponse relations, are controlled. When consistent tone effects are provided after responses are made, performance in serial-reaction tasks is better than when the effects are random. Methodology in which acquisition and test stages are used with choicereaction tasks shows that an action is automatically associated with its effect bilaterally and that anticipation of the effect facilitates action. Ideomotor phenomena include stimulusresponse compatibility, in which the perceptual feature of the stimulus activates its corresponding action code when the stimulus itself resembles the effect codes. For this reason, other stimulus-driven action facilitation such as ideomotor action and imitation are treated as ideomotor phenomena and are reviewed. Ideomotor theory also implies that ongoing action affects perception of concurrent events, a topic which we review briefly. Issues concerning ideomotor theory are identified and evaluated. We categorize the range of ideomotor explanations into several groups by whether intermediate steps are assumed to complete sensorimotor transformation or not and by whether a general theoretical framework or a more restricted one is provided by the account. Keywords: ideomotor theory, motor control, action planning, common coding, response effect association

An approach to perceptionaction relations called ideomotor theory originated in the 19th century along two roots (Stock & Stock, 2004): those of the German philosophers Herbart (1816, 1825), Lotze (1852), and Harless (1861) and those of the British physiologists Laycock (1845) and Carpenter (1852). Various versions of ideomotor theory have been promulgated, but the idea behind them all is that internal images of actions and the actions themselves are tightly linked or that perceptual events tend to generate actions for which the feedback is similar. James (1890/ 1950) emphasized ideomotor theory and brought it to the attention of many psychologists. With the advent of behaviorism, ideomotor theory fell into disfavor due to challenges posed by Thorndike (1913) and others. The first modern statement of ideomotor theory was that of Greenwald (1970), who published studies on what he called the ideomotor principle. Also in the early 1970s, some animal learning researchers began to incorporate the concept of action effect in their theories (e.g., Bolles, 1972). However, widespread interest in ideomotor theory did not occur until later,

starting with a chapter by Prinz (1987). Since then, there has been increasing effort devoted to developing ideomotor theory and conducting experiments related to the principle. Stock and Stock (2004) reviewed the history of ideomotor theory up to the middle of the 20th century. The present article is intended as a complement to their article; in it, we review and evaluate contemporary work on ideomotor theory from that time to the present. After describing use of the term ideomotor, we briefly discuss the early views of ideomotor theory. In the remainder of the article, we review contemporary research.

Use of the Term Ideomotor


As of Week 1 of February 2010, PsycINFO listed 134 entries with ideomotor/ideo-motor in the title and 517 results with it as keyword. About 60% of those entries are related to the study of ideomotor apraxia, a neurological disorder characterized by an inability to translate an idea into voluntary movement (Rothi & Ochipa, 1991). In other entries, the term ideomotor/ideo-motor is used in various contexts, with the concept loosely defined. Ideomotor action narrowly indicates movements that arise in individuals while they observe actions of others (e.g., Knuf, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001) or action control guided by an anticipatory representation of the actions sensory feedback (e.g., Elsner & Hommel, 2001). Several investigators have also studied ideomotor (IM)-compatible tasks for which the response feedback resembles the stimulus (e.g., Greenwald & Shulman, 1973). The following are examples of use of the term ideomotor:
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This article was published Online First September 6, 2010. Yun Kyoung Shin, Robert W. Proctor, and E. J. Capaldi, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University. Robert W. Proctors work on the article was supported in part by Army Research Office Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Grant W911NF-05-1-0153. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yun Kyoung Shin, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1364. E-mail: ykshin@psych.purdue.edu

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The term ideomotor action denotes body movements that tend to arise in observers watching other people perform certain actions (Knuf et al., 2001, p. 779). The term ideo-motor action has been used to refer to movements that are performed in accordance with movements that are perceivedi.e., to situations where action is (seems to be) immediately guided by perception (Prinz, 1987, p. 47). In terms of IM [ideomotor] theory, the response code is directly activated by signals that closely resemble sensory feedback from the response. A relationship between stimulus and response of IM compatibility is defined, then, as one in which the stimulus resembles sensory feedback from the response (Greenwald & Shulman, 1973, p. 70). The feedback of the button-pressing response does not totally resemble the vibration stimulation and the ideomotor compatibility is relatively low (ten Hoopen, Akerboom, & Raaymakers, 1982, p. 156). Ideomotor comes from the Greek word idea, meaning form, and the Latin word motare, meaning to move about, and is defined by Merriam-Websters Online Dictionary as not reflex but motivated by an idea (Ideomotor, n.d.). Most of the ideomotor referents indicate phenomena of induced action either endogenously or exogenously. Historically, ideomotor action has referred to sympathetic action, which is induced movement evoked by a dynamic visual scene (Knuf et al., 2001; Prinz, 1987). Though research has focused mainly on the influence of perceivable environmental change on action, as reflected by use of the more popular term ideomotor action rather than the term ideomotor perception, the ideomotor approach does not deny the opposite direction of influence on perception while a certain action is being performed.

Historical Background of Ideomotor Action


The term ideomotor action was first coined by Carpenter (1852), who viewed ideomotor action as a reflex action of the cerebrum . . . that manifests itself not only in Psychical change, but also in Muscular movements: and these may . . . proceed . . . from simple Ideas, without any excitement of Feeling, in which case they may be designated ideo-motor (1874, p. 105). Carpenter is known for invoking ideomotor action to explain paranormal phenomena such as table turning in seances, magic movement of a pendulum held by a string, and movement of a divining rod used for dowsing. These reflex actions were considered by him to be most evident for situations in which the current of thought and feeling flows on under the sole guidance of Suggestion, and without any interference from the Will (1874, p. 105). Carpenter also considered ideomotor action to be involved in many behaviors, stating, We may range under the same category all those actions performed by us in our ordinary course of life, which are rather the automatic expressions of the ideas that may be dominant in our minds at the time, than prompted by distinct volitional efforts (1874, p. 280). According to Carpenter, In a certain state of mental concentration, the expectation of a result is sufficient to determinewithout any voluntary effort, and even in opposition to the Will (for this may be honestly exerted in the attempt to keep the hand perfectly unmoved)the Muscular movements by which it is produced (1874, p. 287). Carpenters views on ideomotor action were based on those of Laycock (1845), who observed that hydrophobic patients (i.e.,

persons with rabies) reacted physically not only to water itself but also to the idea of water provided through suggestion. From these observations, Laycock concluded that mental images were sufficient to initiate actions reflexively. Laycock (1860) treated voluntary motoric acts in a similar manner, saying, The intent as to the future . . . arises in the consciousness before the state I will passes into act. This includes two thingsa perception of the end, and a desire to attain it (p. 55). The German philosophers were interested in formulating ideomotor theory as a general explanation of action control. Herbarts (1816, 1825) views on ideomotor action are especially similar to those of current researchers. He did not restrict ideomotor action to reflexive behavior, and he considered the role of learning in the development of ideomotor codes. According to Herbart, actions are initiated by anticipation or desire of the to-be-produced sensory effects. He proposed a two-step process: (a) automatic association of actions and their sensory effects when they are executed and (b) purposeful use of these associations to initiate actions and bring about the intended action effects. Lotze (1852) and Harless (1861) expanded on Herbarts views. James (1890/1950) defined ideomotor action as the sequence of movement upon the mere thought of it (p. 522), saying, Whenever movement follows unhesitatingly and immediately the notion of it in the mind, we have ideo-motor action (p. 522). He suggested that the immediate or direct relation between ideas and movements is the critical factor to induce a voluntary movement by assuming that an action is represented in terms of the sensory form of its effect. According to James (1890/1950, p. 526), merely thinking of its effect image will activate the intended motor program: Every representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object. One reason why movements will not occur in all situations is that the bare presence of another idea will prevent its taking place (p. 527). James attributed development of ideomotor action to the co-occurrence of sensory input and action: When a sensation has once produced a movement in us, the next time we have the sensation, it tends to suggest the idea of a movement, even before the movement occurs (p. 585). Stock and Stock (2004) noted that although ideomotor theory fell out of favor early in the 20th century, a few researchers pursued its implications in empirical and theoretical work. We will not review the work that they covered but will describe Hulls (1931) proposed solution to ideomotor behavior. Hull developed the notion of anticipatory goal reactions, depicted as rG sG, which in his theory are representations of the goal reaction (RG) and the resulting proprioceptive stimuli (SG). He argued against the view that ideas precede and evoke acts. According to Hull:
In contrast to that view, the hypothesis here put forward is (1) that ideo-motor acts are in reality anticipatory goal reactions and, as such, are called into existence by ordinary physical stimulation; and (2) that these anticipatory goal reactions are pure-stimulus acts and, as such, guide and direct the more explicit and instrumental activities of the organism. In short, ideo-motor acts, instead of being evoked by ideas, are ideas. (p. 502)

Thus, Hull (1931) emphasized the importance of the goal action and resulting sensory feedback in his explanation of ideomotor behavior. Hulls analysis was given detailed coverage by Greenwald (1970) in his article that initiated the modern revival of

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ideomotor theories of action. Greenwald stated, The fundamental insight in Hulls rG sG analysis was the use of sensory feedback from an anticipated response as a mediator of performance (p. 78). However, Hulls insight has not been credited in most subsequent work on the topic.

A Modern Version of Ideomotor Theory: Greenwalds (1970) Ideomotor Mechanism


Greenwalds (1970) analysis of the ideomotor mechanism is generally regarded as a revival of Jamess (1890/1950) ideomotor principle and a functional translation of Jamess ideas into more verifiable terms (e.g., Knuf et al., 2001). Greenwald contrasted four different feedback mechanisms mediating voluntary performance: serial chaining, fractional anticipatory goal response, closed-loop mechanism, and ideomotor mechanism. In all mechanisms, sensory feedback resulting from self-action is considered a crucial mediator in action control. Greenwald gave special reference (p. 73) to the ideomotor principle and noted that it is a basic mechanism of voluntary action. Greenwald (1970) suggested that the idea or image of a response and contiguity of events are sufficient for instrumental conditioning. According to his description of Jamess (1890/1950) derivation of the ideomotor mechanism, there are three significant events1 (see Figure 1): Stimulus (S)response (R) effect/sensory feedback (E). The S, R, and E events unfold in sequence across time, and they are usually contingent or causally related to each other. If an agent generates a certain movement, action-dependent feedback will follow. Unique triplets of S1R1E1, S2R2E2, . . . , SnRnEn occur repeatedly to an agent. By repeated exposure to the contingent triplets, the agent can associate the relationship between events automatically to some degree. This association results in conditioned anticipatory images of response feedback (Greenwald, 1970, p. 85),2 denoted by the lowercase letter en, in Figure 1. Anticipatory images are conditioned to each contingent forthcoming effect and then finally acquire discriminative control over their corresponding responses even without the original stimulus to trigger the responses. Anticipatory associations are chained between the consecutive elements of the effect sequence so that activation of the anticipatory image triggers the anticipation of the next effect to be produced, which in turn triggers the respective serial response. In the ideomotor mechanism, a motor command is exhaustively coded with the intrinsic feedback that it aims to generate. Greenwald (1970) suggested use of a two-phase experimental method, practice and test, to investigate the ideomotor principle. For the practice phase, a participant is exposed to the contingent triplets of S1R1E1 repeatedly, and the response (R1) is conditioned to the anticipatory image of distinctive sensory consequences (e1). For the test phase, the combined event of S1 with E1 is presented, and E1 is not a task-relevant stimulus to be performed. The response to the target stimulus S1 will be executed faster and more accurately than in the control condition, which is a triplet of three events that has never been experienced before. In the last decade, the experimental paradigm consisting of practice and test phases has become the main setting for investigations of action effects (e.g., Elsner & Hommel, 2001; Kunde, Koch, & Hoffman, 2004).

Figure 1. Panels a d illustrate hypothetical associations in Greenwalds (1970) ideomotor mechanism. Some of the denotation here was revised, but the basic structure is the same as in Greenwalds article. The capital letters denote the overt sensory (S for stimulus and E for effect) and motor events (R), and lowercase letters denote internal images of perceivable events. Automatic bonds between events are connected by solid lines, and conditioned bonds are connected by dotted lines. Thus, en represents internalized image of forthcoming action effect. Repeated experience of stimulusresponse and following consistent action effect (Panel a) results in conditioned anticipatory image to a certain stimulus (Panel b), which then becomes anticipatory to the actual effect (Panel c). Panel d demonstrates that the anticipatory images eventually acquire the control over the sequence of the actions. Adapted from Sensory Feedback Mechanisms in Performance Control: With Special Reference to the Ideo-Motor Mechanism, by A. Greenwald, 1970, Psychological Review, 77, p. 85. Copyright 1970 by the American Psychological Association.

The Theory of Event Coding


The most influential ideomotor theory in recent years is Hommel, Musseler, Aschersleben, and Prinzs (2001) theory of event coding (TEC), which is based on a common representational system of perception and action codes. TEC is a theoretical framework rather than a fully articulated theory; some of its core concepts, such as event, are loosely defined, although the concepts have been elaborated in later studies (e.g., Hommel, 2007b). Consequently, the theory is not easily falsifiable, as the authors mentioned. They suggested that TECs empirical validity could be tested within task-specific models derived from the general theory. TEC has been referred to in more than 300 articles and is regarded
1 The original alphabetical denotation that Greenwald used was partially changed to avoid confusion of terms used in this review. Uppercase letters denote overt external events, and lowercase letters denote covert internal state. 2 Images refer to central representations of sensory feedback from responses (Greenwald, 1970, p. 84).

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as a powerful framework in terms of its heuristic and explanatory power in general. The following are TECs basic assumptions: (a) Perceived and to-be-produced events are represented in a common domain; (b) actions are represented in a similar distributed fashion as perception; (c) the codes referring to the event are part of an abstract and contents-driven distal description rather than a proximal reference of the events; (d) event codes are integrated and activated by two-stage procedures; and (e) event codes are structured with several hierarchical levels. Hommel et al. (2001) noted that TEC incorporates some components from older ideas, especially from the theorists who postulated an integrated relation between perception and action planning (e.g., Gibson, 1950). The original ideomotor principle (e.g., Greenwald, 1970; James, 1890/1950) also has been reinterpreted in more specific terms. The representational structure of TEC is close to that of a cortical network suggesting that features of the events, such as color, shape, and location, are activated in a distributed fashion (Allport, 1987; Singer, 1994). How these distributed codes are integrated into one code that refers to one consistent event and how two different codes of stimulus and response can be represented within a common domain are the key issues addressed by TEC.

Event File
How the brain encodes each feature of an object has been studied since the 1960s, and this research has shown the brain system to be highly segregated (e.g., Livingstone & Hubel, 1988). How these distributed features are integrated into one homogenous representation, usually called the binding problem, has remained a puzzle. Behaviorally, Treisman and Schmidt (1982) and Kahneman, Treisman, and Gibbs (1992) found that perceiving an event automatically induces binding of the individual codes representing it. Kahneman et al. refined the original feature integration theory by claiming that feature-code bindings are integrated together with more abstract semantic knowledge in an object file. As a knowledge-enriched structure of specific feature combinations, an object file does not just register features of a perceived object but also represents an episodic trace of a particular stimulus perceived in a particular context. TECs core concept of event is a more generalized form of object file. Event file refers to both perception and action description. Hommel et al. (2001) defined event as an easily discriminable, well-defined snapshot of the world or a single, discrete movement (p. 864). Every external event, including ones own action, is coded in an event file. Hommel et al. (2001; Hommel, 2003) proposed that planning an action also should be represented in a manner parallel to how visual objects are represented and integrated. Perceiving and action planning are functionally equivalent, inasmuch as they are alternative ways of doing the same thing.

cording to them, the outermost layer is D, which refers to objects, people, and events existing in the real world. These distal things are experienced as beings (D ) through transformation of physical attributes of the things (V) such as light or sound energy, which is an incomplete copy of the things, into corresponding neural patterns by the sense organs (V ). The event code is a modality-free functional description of an object, which represents meaningful interaction of ones action in the environmental context. Kahneman et al. (1992) suggested that only a distal and contents-oriented description is functionally and practically usable to describe and control an action consciously. MacKay (1982, 1987) also proposed that the end processes of perception and action are highly segregated but that the cognitive level of the analysis communicates with the same processing language and in the same way with perception and action. The fine-tuned motor command or reafferent information hardly enters awareness. Hommel et al. (2001) indicated that TECs theoretical scope is limited to the late cognitive products of perceptual processing (D in the previously discussed terminology) and early cognitive antecedents of action. Event codes for action and perception refer to the same distal features in the environment, coded in terms of the perceiver-and-environment relation, including any bodyrelated information. The concept of distal coding is analogous to that of affordance advanced by Gibson (1950). Gibson regarded perception as a process of extracting invariant information about potential contents of action in an optic array; therefore, action does not require transformation of the contents of the perceptual analysis into actionable codes. TEC also suggests that action planning specifies the codes of the intended action features, which are activated when one perceives the stimulus; thus, complex adaptive values like walk-on-ability, grasp-ability, and sit-on-ability are picked up in the course of perceiving. Hommel et al. (2001) explained how codes are integrated in a common system (see Figure 2). Two feature codes, f1 and f2,

Distal Coding of Events


To represent action and perception in a common domain, the codes should refer to distal events in the environment. Hommel (2009) commented that the distal concept is based on terminology from Heider (1926/1959, 1930/1959) and Brunswik (1944), who distinguished four different layers of the perceiving world. Ac-

Figure 2. Feature coding according to theory of event coding (TEC). In the example, sensory codes coming from two different sensory systems (s1, s2, s3, and s4, s5, s6, respectively) converge onto two abstract feature codes (f1 and f2) in a common coding system. These feature codes spread their activation to codes belonging to two different motor systems (m1, m2, m3, and m4, m5, m6). Sensory and motor codes refer to proximal information; feature codes in the common coding system refer to distal information. Reprinted from The Theory of Event Coding (TEC): A Framework for Perception and Action Planning, by B. Hommel, J. Musseler, G. Aschersle ben, and W. Prinz, 2001, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, p. 862. Copyright 2001 by the Cambridge University Press.

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denote left and high, respectively. These codes are made by listening to a high-pitch tone from the left side: f1 receives any perceptual input relating to left from the visual system (S1, S2) or auditory system (S4), and f2 processes information relating to high from visual system (S3) and auditory system (S5 and S6). Each sensory input or motor output refers to proximal information, whereas feature codes are represented in distal information. An action plan can be executed by activation of these feature codes. Activation of f1 may facilitate any left action such as saying left or moving the eye to the left. Thus, the feature codes control all relevant effectors rather than being limited to a specific mode. Activating features f1 and f2 simultaneously produces a homogeneous event code; thus, hearing left in a high-pitch tone will automatically activate saying left in a high-pitch tone.

Remarks on the Ideomotor Mechanism


The core character of ideomotor accounts is that actions are represented in terms of their sensorial effects, which can be classified in different manners. Greenwald (1970) categorized feedback on the basis of the pathway used to transmit the sensory information. Interoceptive feedback is delivered by proprioception, including kinesthetic or muscular feeling of the movement; in contrast, exteroceptive feedback is delivered by visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory pathways. Effects can also be categorized by whether the source of information is from the actors own body or the outside environment. Resident effects refer to the sensory consequences occurring with body movements, and remote effects are the environmental consequences such as the flight of a ball after one throws it (Hommel et al., 2001). In terms of Greenwalds categorization, the visual feedback of the arms movement trajectory is exteroceptive, but in terms of the resident/remote categorization, it is resident. When the ball hits the body as a consequence of an action, this can be defined as interoceptive and also remote. The ideomotor accounts take all types of effects into their theoretical consideration, Most ideomotor accounts do not specify which effect type is of concern in their theoretical structure, though mostly exteroceptive and remote effects are manipulated in the experiments. Greenwald (1970) even suggested that his ideomotor analysis could be generalized to extrinsic feedback, which is controlled by an outer mechanism such as reinforcement. Hommel et al. (2001) also conjectured that any kind of action-contingent event (e.g., turning on a light, producing a tone, pressing a key) could be accommodated by its TEC account. TECs proximal/distal concept is thought to be different from the resident/remote categorization, although Hommel et al. (2001) sometimes used expressions such as proximal effect. The definition is not from the source of the effect or the sensory pathways but from the manner of the coding. As far as perception is concerned, the distal information (D) existing in the world is recovered (D ) even with arbitrary encoding (V ) of the physical attributes (V). V seems to be inherently ambiguous and noisy, and V lacks the richness of the real world, but the correlation between V and V is assumed to be high, and the restoration (D ) is a veridical representation of the world (D). Since only D can be consciously accessed and D refers to the same D for action and perception, this level of information is suggested to be functionally usable to control actions. V layers are

involved in different types of neural activity for processing input and output information and thus are incommensurate. Though the feedback (action effect) is conjectured as a core dynamic force, the ideomotor mechanism can be contrasted with the closed-loop mechanism, in which peripheral information of resident effects is used to update parameters of continuous movements (Adams, 1971). Adams hypothesized that feedback from responses leaves a perceptual trace, which is used as a goal to be compared with current performance. If incoming feedback signals a discrepancy from that goal, this difference results in error, and an individual can adjust error by minimizing the difference between performance and goal. Comparing and correcting error occurs until the movement achieves the final goal state. Hence, adjustment of motor execution emerges from a dynamic interaction between the motor system and the environment. In contrast, the ideomotor principle emphasizes the process of selecting and initiating an action (Kunde et al., 2004), although some authors have suggested that the ideomotor mechanism also serves an evaluative function in that the outcome of the performance is compared with the intended effect in real time (Band, van Steenbergen, Ridderinkhof, Falkenstein, & Hommel, 2009; Nattkemper & Ziessler, 2004).

Reflexive Behavior, Volition, and Consciousness


Another characteristic of ideomotor accounts is immediacy between perception and action, which means that no intermediate steps are required for motor transformation from idea. Thus, although ideomotor control is essentially endogenous action starting from a certain intention, it also includes motor activation from a physically given stimulus such as sympathetic, induced actions and stimulusresponse compatibility (SRC) effects. Seemingly exogenous control is included in ideomotor accounts because (a) the mental and physical events are not dissociable (thus, the physical event is transformed into a mental representation) and (b) when the stimulus itself resembles its anticipatory image, the stimulus activates ideomotor control. With regard to the ideomotor characteristic of immediacy of action, the role of conscious intent in action control should be identified (Westwood & Goodale, 2001). Because of the illdefined nature of consciousness, the debate about what a conscious process is easily leads to an agree-to-disagree argument. Consciousness is often defined with a dichotomous description contrasting it to un-, sub-, or nonconsciousness. Historically, in dualprocess theory, controlled versus automatic processing has been stereotyped as denoting conscious versus subconscious processing. Other terms used to represent consciousness include supraliminal, intentional, effortful, serial process, voluntary, intelligent, controllable, accessible, and reportable. In contrast, terms used to represent unconsciousness include subliminal, unintentional, effortless, parallel process, involuntary, dumb, uncontrollable, inaccessible, and nonreportable. However, this dichotomous approach has been criticized. For example, Bargh and Morsella (2008) called unconsciously controlled behavior, such as highly skilled behavior without conscious guidance, intelligent adaptive unconscious behavior, breaking the boundary of the conscious/unconscious dichotomy. Also, Hommel (2007a) suggested the concept of automatic goaldriven behavior, saying that even an automatic process reflects a current task goal. Nowadays, even a more radical statement is being made: that the acts are essentially unconsciously activated

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and that the phenomenal experience of causality by free will is a perceived illusion (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002; Wegner, 2003). James (1890/1950), who was most responsible for promulgating the concept of ideomotor action in psychology, described action as following unhesitatingly and immediately (p. 522) the idea in the mind. In his view, no intervening mental operation (will) is necessary for evoking muscular movement from the idea of sensory feedback. James said, with regard to ideomotor action,
The question is this: Is the bare idea of a movements sensible effects its sufficient mental cue . . . , or must there be an additional mental antecedent, in the shape of a fiat, decision, consent, volitional mandate, or other synonymous phenomenon of consciousness, before the movement can follow? I answer: Sometimes the bare idea is sufficient, but sometimes an additional conscious element, in the shape of a fiat, mandate, or express consent, has to intervene and precede the movement. The cases without a fiat constitute the more fundamental . . . . (p. 522)

They also indicated, In TEC, event coding in perception and action is highly (although not completely) dependent on the perceiver/actors current aims and goals (p. 863). Although Hommel et al. (2001) did not take an explicit stance on the issue of consciousness, the terms volition, will, goals, and intentions that they use are typically treated as synonymous with consciousness, as James (1890/1950) noted (see Hommel, 2007a, for an argument for distinguishing goal-driven behavior from consciousness). Definitions of volition include the capability of conscious choice and decision and intention (Volition, n.d.-a) and a conscious choice or decision (Volition, n.d.-b), and goal-driven behavior frequently is equated with conscious control (e.g., Umilta, 1988). Moreover, in Hommel et al.s (2001) response ` to commentaries on their article, they stated that TEC shares several attributes of the ventral sensory stream, which is involved in object identification (what it is) and closely linked with conscious awareness, rather than the dorsal stream, which provides information for guidance of action (where it is; Milner & Goodale, 1995):
The ventral stream of their [Milner & Goodales] model seems to share several attributes with the perception-action system TEC proposes. It is assumed to work off-line to mediate associate learning, and make use of its results, and to make sure that the animals behavior meets emotional needs and social requirements. These features would make the ventral stream a perfect candidate for mediating perception and action planning along the lines of TEC. (p. 925)

Later in his book, James also stressed the tight link between perception and action, saying,
No impression or idea of eye, ear, or skin comes to us without occasioning a movement, even though the movement be no more than the accommodation of the sense-organ; and all our trains of sensation and sensational imagery have their terms alternated and interpenetrated with motor processes, of most of which we practically are unconscious . . . . From this point of view the distinction of sensory and motor cells has no fundamental significance. All cells are motor. (1890/1950, p. 581)

The mundane actions are supposed to be instigated by incoming sensations and fleeting ideas without interrupting other activities. Carpenter (1852) also defined ideomotor action as reflexlike behavior, for which the idea itself has impulsive features that correlate to the neuronal activity, and thus the mere idea is sufficient to initiate action. Conscious intent to act is not an antecedent of the action. In both Carpenters and Jamess (1890/1950) views, will seems to play a gate-keeping role to keep a certain action from being set in motion in an antagonistic way. This idea is echoed by modern accounts in which control is treated as self-regulatory in nature, inhibiting or suppressing inappropriate or unwanted responses (e.g., Baumeister & Vohs, 2004). Thus, although an intentional property was included in the original ideomotor view to account for human behavior (as in the answer by James cited earlier), the ideomotor process tended to be treated as a more or less subconscious one. The assumption of ideomotor action as a reflexive expression of idea still existed in Greenwalds (1970) version of the ideomotor principle, but recent formulations have placed relatively more emphasis on intentional actions. In their characterization of ideomotor views, for which their TEC is an example, Hommel et al. (2001) stated,
Ideomotor views stress the role of internal (volitional) causes of action and at the same time disregard the role of external (sensory) causes. . . . In this view, actions are considered creations of the will events that come into being because people pursue goals and entertain intentions to realize them. (p. 856)

The link between the ventral stream and consciousness is sufficiently strong that Westwood and Goodale (2001), in a commentary on Hommel et al.s (2001) article, labeled that pathway the ventral stream of conscious visual perception (p. 908). Given the terminology used by Hommel et al. and their relating TEC to the ventral stream, it seems reasonable to say that TEC stresses intentional action of the type typically associated with consciousness more than most prior ideomotor views do.

Tests of the Ideomotor Principle


The ideomotor principle has been tested with several research methods. Recently, scientific inquiries into the ideomotor mechanism have been conducted mainly by the TEC theorists. These inquiries include (a) acquisition of associations between actions and their effects in incidental sequence learning, (b) examination of relations between actions and their effects in choice-reaction tasks, (c) comparison of SRC effects for sets with different ideomotor relations, and (d) consideration of actions induced in an individual by his or her viewing dynamic scenes or others performing actions. Also, some researchers who credited their formulations to Jamess (1890/1950) ideomotor action have investigated the topic of consciousness (e.g., Aarts, Custer, & Marien, 2008; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999), and others the issue of how ongoing action modulates encoding of a perceivable scene (e.g., Schutz Bosbach & Prinz, 2007). We review this research in the following sections.

Goal-Driven Action: ActionEffect Paradigm


Most of the behaviors people perform are intended to produce certain outcomes. For example, a driver turns a steering wheel

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counterclockwise to turn a vehicle to the left, a person presses an up button to call an elevator to go to a higher floor, and so on. Current versions of ideomotor theory consider actions to be inevitably goal driven and therefore view accounts of human behavior as requiring a larger role for the element of action effects than is typical. Evidence about spontaneous acquisition of contingent relationships between actions and their effects has been provided in several studies (e.g., Elsner & Hommel, 2001; Hoffman, Sebald, & Stocker, 2001; Ziessler, 1998). The consensus of these studies is that voluntary behavior is initiated by anticipation of the outcome of the to-be-performed action. As Greenwald (1970) suggested in his formulation of the ideomotor mechanism, the training phase of acquisition of the associative relationship among stimulus response effect (SRE) and the test phase of measurement of the priming effect of E to activate a certain response have been used for testing ideomotor theory. One of the first experiments to investigate the role of action effects is that of Morin and Grant (1955), in which participants performed a task for which eight keypress responses (executed by eight fingers on keys) were made to the locations of eight red stimulus lights. A row of green lights mapped compatibly to the response keys was located immediately below the row of stimulus lights. When a key was pressed, it turned on the corresponding green light as an action effect. On each trial, two stimulus lights appeared simultaneously to which their assigned keypresses were to be made. For different participants, various SR mappings were used, including completely compatible, mirror-opposite, random, and four other mappings with intermediate positive or negative correlations between stimulus and response locations. Participants were instructed to try to learn the mapping by matching the response lights to the stimulus lights. Across nine blocks of 25 trials each, reaction time (RT) decreased in all conditions but more so for the more difficult SR mappings. In a 10th block, for which the response lights were deactivated, RT increased for all conditions except that with the compatible SR mapping. Morin and Grant (1955) noted,
In general, the amount of loss in performance efficiency seemed to be directly related to the difficulty during Blocks 19. It may be concluded, therefore, that the green lights provided important visual information and that their importance was directly related to the difficulty of the task or the lack of correspondence between display and control. (p. 43)

Thus, participants acquired knowledge of the relation between actions and their visual effects, which they used for controlling the action when the mapping was not compatible. There is currently a revival of interest in the idea of coupling action and perception codes with more theoretically oriented experimental investigations, and action effect studies have become one of the primary domains for the study of the ideomotor principle. Two task paradigms have been used to elucidate the relation between action and effect. One is serial RT (SRT; e.g., Ziessler, 1998), and the other is choice RT (CRT; e.g., Hommel, 1996). In an SRT task, a sequence of stimuli and actions is repeated periodically, and benefits in performance of this repetition are examined. SRT tasks are usually carried out to explore how skill is acquired from repeated coupling of actions and their effects, such as a playing a musical instrument. In CRT tasks, there is no

systematic sequence to trials, and the emphasis is on associations between actions and their effects. CRT tasks were motivated by Greenwalds (1970) original ideomotor formulation of a two-stage association, and they have the goal of explicating the bidirectional relation between action and perception. Both paradigms assume that all human behaviors are purposeful. In both tasks (reviewed later), performance is usually better when a required response is coupled with a unique outcome and the relation between action and outcome is consistent. The manipulation of action effect and its relation to other events is a key variable of interest. Historically, three events in series stimulus, response, and outcome have been identified as significant in experimental trials. The relation between stimuli and responses has been investigated extensively, but outcomes have often been omitted from theoretical interests, especially in human behavior. Experimenters typically offered the action effects as feedback about whether the response was correct or incorrect. They did not consider in much detail the structure of outcomes in their theoretical systems (Bush, Galanter, & Luce, 1963). However, the manipulation of the reinforcer, that is, the action outcome, has been shown to be vital in producing learning in animals and has been of longtime theoretical interest. Instrumental behavior is controlled by its consequences. If a response to a stimulus offers a satisfying event, the responsestimulus (RS) association is strengthened (the law of effect; Thorndike, 1905). After acquisition of the association between behavior and its contingent consequence, an animal will perform goal-directed actions to influence the environment. A number of studies have shown that animals are highly sensitive to changes of the outcome situation, such as delay in delivery of the reinforcer, contingency or contiguity of the reinforcer, and quantity and quality of the reinforcer (e.g., for contiguity, Lattal & Gleeson, 1990; for contingency, Caspy & Lubow, 1981). When two discriminative responses are followed consistently by two different outcomes, animals learn to differentiate the two stimuli more quickly and accurately than if the same outcome occurs for both responses, a phenomenon called the differential outcome effect (e.g., Trapold, 1970; Urcuioli & DeMarse, 1996). The differential outcome paradigm has shown that the response outcome is not a passive motivator to induce an intended behavior, but rather it is a critical element of learning that modulates behavior. The implications from instrumental behavior for animal learning seem to be relevant to voluntary action of human behavior. Hommel et al. (2003) suggested that the differential outcome paradigm can be applied to evaluate bidirectional response effect (RE) mechanisms in human learning. Elsner and Hommel (2004) proposed that if associational learning of action effects is mediating the selection of action, action selection should be influenced by factors known to affect instrumental learning in animal behavior. They reported that the manipulation of contingency and contiguity between an action and its effect modulated speed and accuracy with which animals acquired the action effect relation. Also, ideomotor theory assumes that any perceivable feedback resulting from an action can be formulated as an anticipatory image to initiate action, provided that the effect is reliably consistent with the responses (Greenwald, 1970). For example, effects such as tactile sensations and perceivable consequences of environmental change can be coded as anticipatory images. The kinesthetic response effects from a keypress may exert control over

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response selection, and participants can learn an SRT task merely with contingent tactile perception, without any reference to external events (Hoffmann & Koch, 1997). Though any perceivable events can be associated with an action, Hommel et al. (2001) claimed that the common cognitive codes for action and perception refer to the distal events. Only distal events can be coded at an abstract level and shared among different modalities, and distal coding is the level to which TEC applies. A similar suggestion was made by de Wit and Dickinson (2009) in connection with animal instrumental learning. They suggested that the intention to act is produced by an interaction of a belief about a causal relation between the action and the outcome, influenced by the current desire for the outcome. Resident effects are difficult to manipulate arbitrarily as independent variables (cf. ten Hoopen et al., 1982). Therefore, remote effects offered as results of actions are typically used to construct and evaluate theories related to action effects. In most experiments, auditory tone effects or visual display onsets have been used as action effects. In the following, we examine action effect studies with regard to the ideomotor principle and show how evidence from those studies can help formulate the ideomotor principle in more precise terms.

Action Effect in Serial Reaction-Time Tasks


Nissen and Bullemer (1987) introduced what has become the standard SRT procedure. In their study, participants made indexand middle-finger responses on four keys mapped compatibly to a row of four asterisks. The experimenters presented the stimuli in a repeating sequence of 10 elements without informing participants of the event regularities. Performance improved across 10 blocks of practice for participants who received the repeating sequence compared with those who received a random trial order. When participants in the repeated-sequence condition were tested with a random trial order in the next-to-the-last block, their performance was disrupted, indicating that the regularity of the stimulus response sequence was incorporated into behavioral control. This incorporation seemed to have occurred automatically, since participants showed little awareness of the stimulus regularity. A participant develops an internal model of the sequential structure, and this model is activated and applied to anticipate future events. The general procedure in which a repeated sequence is replaced by a random or deviant trial block has been used to measure learning in many subsequent studies (e.g., Koch, 2001; Koch & Hoffmann, 2000; Ziessler, 1998). The SRT task is considered to be an experimental analog of skilled behavior in everyday life (Hoffmann et al., 2001; Ziessler & Nattkemper, 2001). The world presents predictable events by its regular characteristics, and humans adapt to these structured elements and prepare for upcoming events. Hoffmann et al. (2001) presumed that sensitivity to serial order should be regarded as a critical ability of an organism to adapt in the external world. The knowledge about the sequence is consequently employed to select the correct action and accelerate its initiation.

What Is Acquired During Serial Learning?


Two main accounts have been proposed to explain what element of a sequential structure is learned for skilled serial behavior. Some

researchers have argued that knowledge about the relation of the stimulus sequence is obtained by stimulusstimulus (SS) associations (e.g., Cleeremans & McClelland, 1991; Lewicki, Czyzewska, & Hoffman, 1987). According to this SS based learning account, a participant predicts a particular sequence of stimuli after repeated exposure to the systematic sequence. The other main account is based on responseresponse (RR) associations (e.g., Nattkemper & Prinz, 1997; Ziessler, 1994). According to this account, a participant learns motor execution in sequence, and this knowledge is generated when a similar pattern of responses is required. Thus, the issue involves whether learning is mediated by the perceptual system (SS view) or the motor system (RR view). However, a third (ideomotor) approach that stresses RE learning has also been proposed (Ziessler, 1998; called the RS account). In serial learning tests with a fixed sequence of stimuli that require contingent responses, SS, RR, and RS associations are confounded (e.g., Nissen & Bullemer, 1987): The sequences of stimuli, responses, and relations between the response and the next stimulus all covary. Thus, which type of associational learning contributes to control over the serial behavior cannot be determined unambiguously with this method (Ziessler, 1998). To find out which component is learned in a serial task, researchers must use a task in which the confounded changes of stimulus and response sequences are dissociated. One method is to switch the effector mode in a transfer phase after the sequence training. Cohen, Ivry, and Keele (1990) trained participants to make three different keypresses to the stimulus sequence using three fingers of a single hand. After the learning curve stabilized, a transfer phase was introduced in which participants then pressed the three keys using a single finger on the same hand. This change of effector mode did not disrupt the serial learning acquired previously, and Cohen et al. concluded that knowledge about the sequence of stimulus events is a key component in serial learning. However, selection of the response might occur not only at the physical level of fingers but also at a more abstract level of location codes, with the representational structure being the same for three fingers as for one. If the motor commands to control effectors are changed more radically, serial performance may be disrupted. This proposition seems convincing when one considers that transfer of prior sequential knowledge is impeded when responses are switched from manual to vocal (Keele, Jennings, Jones, Caulton, & Cohen, 1995). Howard, Mutter, and Howard (1992) reported further evidence of stimulus-based learning. They compared transfer performance for an observational group that was exposed to the sequence of positional asterisk stimuli but not required to make any responses and a responding group that made keypresses to the sequence of stimuli. When the observational group was later required to respond to the sequence of stimuli, their performance was similar to that of the responding group. For both groups, performance deteriorated when a random sequence was introduced. Howard et al. concluded that the observational group had acquired the knowledge of event regularity purely by perceptual information and that this knowledge was sufficient to control the serial responses. In contrast, Nattkemper and Prinz (1997) reported evidence in favor of response-based learning. They used an n:1 mapping method in which two stimulus letters were mapped to each of four keypress responses. Participants performed an SRT task composed of repeating sequences of eight elements, divided into two subsets

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of four different letters. For each subset, the response sequence was the same, meaning that it repeated every four trials. Occasionally, a deviant stimulus replaced one stimulus in the sequence. Performance deteriorated when the deviant stimulus led to a different response than in the learned sequence but not when it led to the same response. Therefore, the authors concluded that participants acquired knowledge about response regularities, which is more important than knowledge about stimulus regularity for control of serial behavior. However, if a participant were to detect that a fixed sequence of four responses was repeating within each sequence of eight stimuli, he or she might choose not to attend to changes of the stimuli but only to the sequence of responses. The learning of RS relations in serial behavior has received less attention than the SS and RR possibilities. However, the ideomotor principle implies that RS coupling is the key element to obtain the knowledge of sequential structure (Greenwald, 1970). The chain of anticipatory feedback images of the to-be-performed sequence helps to trigger the sequence of actions in correct order. RS based learning is equivalent to ordinary performance in which people are doing something to bring about the outcome they desire to achieve. For a typical example, a piano player presses the keys to produce intended melodies, not merely to respond to the keynotes. Stocker, Sebald, and Hoffmann (2003) stated that serial behavior in our life is equivalent to producing a series of intended outcomes rather than responding to a series of stimuli. With the previously described n:1 mapping solution to dissociate covariation of response and stimulus, one risks inducing a strategy of not attending to the stimuli since the regularity of the stimulus sequence covaries with that of the response sequence. To prevent this covariation, several researchers have adopted an ambivalent stimulus to which participants respond (e.g., Cock & Meier, 2007; Koch, 2001). An ambivalent stimulus has two properties, usually location and identity, one of which appears in a systematic sequence and the other at random. Participants are told to respond to one stimulus property, the target property, and this property can be dissociated from that of the other stimulus property, to which the participant is not to respond. In their Experiment 3, Willingham, Nissen, and Bullemer (1989) had participants respond to the colors of the stimuli with keypresses. In one condition, the stimulus colors appeared with a systematic sequence while the stimulus locations appeared with random variation; thus, participants acquired the regularity of their responses (responsesequence condition). In another condition, the location of the stimulus appeared in a regular sequence with random variation of the color while the participants were still required to respond to the color (perceptualsequence condition). Thus, participants in this condition had no chance to learn a systematic motor sequence, but they might acquire knowledge of regularity for stimulus location implicitly. Participants in these conditions were compared with a baseline control group that was presented randomly varying color and location sequences. After the training phase, a transfer phase was introduced to each group, which required participants to make keypresses to the locations of the same-colored stimuli. The location sequence of the stimuli was the same in the perceptualsequence condition, and the required serial responses to the location were the same as those in the responsesequence condition. Participants from the perceptualsequence group did not show any advantage from regularity of the target location, whereas participants from the

responsesequence group revealed a strong benefit from systematic learning of their responses during training. This result seemed to favor motor-based learning; however, the responsesequence group did not respond faster when they were required to perform the same motor sequence in the transfer phase. Willingham and colleagues concluded from these results that exclusively stimulusor response-based learning does not exist and that mapping rules underlying the RS pairing may be the critical component of learning.

R-SBased Learning Evidence from Ziessler (1998)


Though Willingham et al.s (1989) study suggested that some RS learning occurred in a serial task, the authors did not specifically examine the possibility for learning the relation between a response and its effect. Ziesslers (1998) study has been widely cited as providing clear evidence of RE association in serial learning. Ziessler investigated the implicit learning components underlying serial reaction tasks using a serial-search-and-reaction task, originally devised in a previous study (Ziessler, 1994), which we describe first. Ziessler (1994) had participants classify target letters (W, S, F, X) with keypresses made by the index and middle fingers of the two hands. Each trial consisted of presentation of a sequence of six letter matrices composed of five rows of six letters each (see Figure 3). For each matrix, one letter was the target for that display, and the remaining letters were not from the target set. Participants were to find the target letter and respond to its identity as quickly and accurately as possible. The presentation of the different target letters was random, and thus there was no systematic sequence of letter identities and responses to learn. For the first display in a sequence, the target letter was always in the center position. For the next display, the target letter could occur in an adjacent position above, below, left, or right of the current target position. Of importance, the current target identity indicated where the next target would be located. The target letter in the second display specified whether the target letter in third display would be above, below, left, or right of it, and so on, until the sixth display. It contained a fifth target letter, to which a keypress with the right thumb was to be made, indicating the end of the sequence. Participants were not told about the relation between the current stimulus identity (Sid) and next stimulus location (Sloc), nor was knowledge of this relation necessary to perform the task. However, if a participant acquired the relation between the current trial and the upcoming event implicitly, he or she would locate the target letter much faster than if he or she did not learn the relation. After participants had performed moderately extensive practice (usually 2 hr) with these sequences, experimenters introduced a deviant session in the last experimental block to assess the participants learning of the relations of Sid and Sloc. For the deviant block, the next stimulus appeared in the location opposite that expected on the basis of the prior relations. Sequential performance was significantly disrupted in this deviant block. However, the question of which knowledge of regularity was acquired still remained because the relation of Sid and Sloc or current response and upcoming Sloc covaried in the experiment. In Ziesslers (1994) Experiment 2, the four critical target letters required a single keypress with the right index finger, and the fifth letter a keypress with the right thumb; in this case, the disruptive effect of the

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Figure 3. Illustration of Ziesslers (1994) task. Example 1 demonstrates a six-element sequence (WFSFXV), and Example 2 demonstrates a four-element sequence (XSSV). At Time 1 (T1), the trial number was presented. The first stimulus followed at T2 in the middle location. The circled letters were target stimuli (the targets are circled in the figure but were not in the experiment). After the stimulus W at T2, the next target appeared one location above the W at T3. Following the stimulus F, the next targets appeared at the relevant location of one position left from the F (see T4 and T6). For responses, LI, LM, RI, LM, RM, and RTH denote left index, left middle, right index, left middle, and right middle fingers and right thumb, respectively. For the different conditions, response to each target letter was to be performed by each distinct finger, whereas for the same condition, same responses were required to be made for all targets except one. Reprinted from The Impact of Motor Responses on Serial Pattern Learning, by M. Ziessler, 1994, Psychological Research, 57, p. 33. Copyright 1994 by Springer.

deviant block was not sizable. If the same responses are made to the different target letters, the relation between the current response and the next target location becomes unsystematic. Therefore, Ziessler concluded that learning of regularity between Sid and Sloc in Experiment 1 was mediated mainly by knowledge of the response and its corresponding effect (the location of the next stimulus). Ziessler (1994) based his conclusion on comparison of his two experiments. However, the task in Experiment 1 was more difficult than that in Experiment 2, because the four critical stimuli required unique responses in the former but the same response in the latter. This could result in participants from Experiment 1 being more attentive to differentiating the identity of the stimulus, thus guiding SS based learning. To rule out this possibility, Ziessler (1998) manipulated RS congruency by adopting the n:1 mapping procedure combined with a bivalent stimulus. He used a procedure similar to that in his previous study but with two letters assigned to each of the four responses. For the high RS congruent condition, the two letters assigned to the same keypress had the same relation to the location in which the next target stimulus would

occur (see Figure 4, left column). The relation between the response and the subsequent stimulus location thus was unique in this condition. For the RS incongruent condition, the two stimuli assigned to the same response did have the same relation to the location in which the next target stimulus would occur (Figure 4, right column). For the medium RS congruent condition, some degree of congruency was still intact; for example, the left-hand response always induced the next stimulus to be located at the left or above the current one (Figure 4, middle column). Through this method, Ziessler could prevent covariation of the current trials stimulus and response to the next event while dissociating response-based and stimulus-based learning. If SS learning is a critical factor in serial learning, the three congruency conditions should not produce different performance, since the relations between the current stimulus and the next stimulus for the three conditions are all unique. A similar prediction is made for RR learning. However, if the regularity of the current response and the next stimulus accounts for the reliable anticipation of controlling serial behavior, the RS congruent condition group should perform better than the groups in other

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Figure 4. Ziessler (1998) manipulated the responsestimuluslocation(RSloc) congruency by assigning different pairings of stimuli to the same response. LI, LM, RI, LM, RM, and RTH represent the effectors left index, left middle, right index, left middle, and right middle fingers and right thumb, respectively, in the same way as in Figure 3. Arrows denote the relevant position of the next stimulus from the current target location. For high RS regularity, two stimuli to which the same keypress response was to be made were followed by the next stimulus located to the left of the current stimulus. For medium RS regularity, the next stimulus appeared in one of two adjacent locations for which certain locational features were still intact (e.g., consequent target locations after left keypresses were always to the left or upward). For low RS regularity, the next target location was unrelated the keypresses made in the current trial. Reprinted from Response-Effect Learning as a Major Component of Implicit Serial Learning, by M. Ziessler, 1998, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, p. 966. Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association.

conditions. This result was found in Ziesslers (1998) Experiment 1. In addition, the RS congruent groups performance was more disrupted by presentation of a random or reversed RS relationship block, which is also evidence of using knowledge of RS congruency to locate the target in the next matrix. Ziessler concluded that the coupling relationship of action and its effect is a key contributing component for controlling serial action. Ziessler and Nattkemper (2001) also examined whether RS learning is a key element to obtain skillful serial learning by adapting Nissen and Bullemers (1987) paradigm. They found that learning and transfer effects occurred when the RS relation was systematic but not when the SS relation was. Ziessler, Nattkemper, and Frensch (2004) further investigated the nature of the RS learning mechanism by presenting distractor tones during response preparation or between response execution and presentation of the effect (the next target letter). The RS learning was disrupted when the distractor occurred during response preparation but not after execution, which Ziessler et al. attributed to impairment of anticipation of potential effects. In a second experiment, they also found that the learning of RS relation was not strictly automatic. Ziessler et al. accomplished this by having a letter and a digit produced as action effects by each keypress response and instructing participants to produce letters or digits. RS learning was found only for the instructed effect category. Ziessler et al. concluded that an anticipated effect is generated during the preparation of response and that learning of action effect proceeds selectively only for the events that contain the intended effect.

Ziessler and Nattkemper (2002) and Ziessler et al. (2004) proposed the anticipative learning model through their RS association studies. This model explains the role of anticipatory effect in the way of an evaluative function, which compares the observed outcome (actual effect) against the intended outcome (anticipated effect) following a particular action. Two different behaviors, cue-driven (forward model) and goal-driven (inverse model), are formulated in an integrated system (see Figure 5). The terms forward and inverse are used in a manner parallel to Wolperts (1997) computational model of motor control. The forward model uses an efference copy to predict the sensory consequences of motor commands. The inverse model provides the motor commands to make adjustments to achieve the desired outcome. The interaction between the inverse and forward mechanisms evokes the anticipative model mechanism.

Serial Learning Task With Irrelevant Action Effect


The SRT tasks described previously are based on the serial learning method introduced by Nissen and Bullemer (1987), in which the learning effect is measured by inserting a deviant block. In those studies, the stimulus has two components at the same time: an outcome resulting from the response and a target stimulus to which a response is to be made for the next trial. Other researchers have investigated the role of a perceivable action effect by dissociating the action effect from the target stimulus in a serial task (e.g., Drost, Rieger, Brass, Gunter, & Prinz, 2005; Hoffmann

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Figure 5. Anticipative learning model of the role of action effect codes in action control. A stimulus directly activates response planning, which results in execution of the action and occurrence of some environmental effect. A desired effect based on goals activates the response planning appropriate for achieving the effect (inverse model). The effect that execution of the activated response plan is likely to produce (forward model) is compared with the desired effect. Differences between desired and anticipated effects provide a basis for modifications of the response plans. Reprinted from The Role of Anticipation and Intention in the Learning of Effects of Self-Performed Actions, by M. Ziessler, D. Nattkemper, and P. Frensch, 2004, Psychological Research, 68, p. 174. Copyright 2004 by Springer.

et al., 2001; Pfordresher, 2005). Participants in those studies performed an SRT task, and the task-irrelevant action effect was presented solely to the response. In most studies, auditory tones have been used as action effects3 because when visual action effects are irrelevant, participants may fail to attend to the effects, whereas an auditory tone tends to attract attention (Hommel et al., 2003). Hoffmann et al. (2001) used an SRT task similar to Nissen and Bullemers (1987) but with distinct irrelevant tone effects triggered by the responses. Faster learning was produced when the tone effects were contingent than when they were not, and the learning was disrupted more for the contingent group when a random block was inserted in the ninth block. Hoffmann et al. also reported that only the contingent group showed disruption of performance when the tone effect changed into another mapping. The tone effects influenced serial learning only when participants were given sufficient time to anticipate them. Hoffmann et al. suggested that the redundant tone effects facilitate establishing the sequential structure of the events. Serial tasks with irrelevant tone effects are analogous to musical performance, such as piano playing, which requires a correct order and timing of keypresses to bring about an intended melody or chord. Drost et al. (2005) reported that pianists responded to the imperative stimuli faster and more accurately when congruent tones followed them. Usually in the piano-playing studies, performance of novices was compared with that of trained pianists (e.g., Finney & Palmer, 2003). Pfordreshers (2003, 2005) studies demonstrated that the difference in performance between novice and trained players is in the initiation timing of the action, not in action selection. One of the simplest ways to evaluate the role of tone effects in serial behavior is to compare performance between conditions with contingent auditory feedback and with no feedback. The size of

disruption is usually measured by response rate and serial ordering errors. It is rather surprising that several researchers have reported that performance in a serial task was unhindered by the absence of feedback (e.g., Finney & Palmer, 2003). However, many others have found disruption of serial performance when the action effects were distorted in some manner. Presentation of altered feedback with unrelated contents or randomized feedback from the planned action did not cause serial performance to deteriorate (Finney, 1997), but when a delay was added for auditory feedback onsets, sizable disruption was induced (e.g., Pfordresher, 2003). Pfordresher (2005) presented altered feedback by offering tone effects in synchrony. Altered feedback was identical to the stimulus sequence structure but with a serial shift (i.e., number of events separating current action and its following tone effects). Disruption of performance depended on similarity of the planned sequence and the sequence of sensory effects. Maximal disruption occurred when the feedback sequence structure was identical, but the sequence was serially shifted so that a lag of one was added between the current action event and the associated feedback event. The least disruption was brought out by randomly selected tone effects or an absence of feedback. When the tone pitches were selected by scrambling the order of the tones among those of the planned action, the disruption was larger than if the tones did not match the planned action at all. Pfordresher concluded that disruption increased as the sequence of the altered feedback events became more similar to the sequence of the planned action. The disruption by altered feedback contents only influenced the error data, and the timing of the execution was not different among the various feedback conditions. Thus, the altered feedback disrupted selection of action but not the timing of execution. This implies that altered auditory feedback hinders planning (related to accuracy) but not execution (related to timing). Pfordresher and Palmer (2006) also used a task that required manual keypresses to serial stimuli with altered feedback from the planned sequence. The feedback of the current event was from the contingent effect of the past action (delays) or future event (prelays). The serial separation between the current event and the planned position of auditory feedback was also varied from one to three. Performance was disrupted by almost the same amount regardless of the manipulation of direction or distance. The authors suggested that a match of planned and perceived outcomes is based on a global level, such as structural similarity, including the local matches between individual planned and perceived events. This explains why performance was drastically disrupted by a serial shift. Pfordreshers (2003, 2005; Pfordresher & Palmer, 2002) findings imply that a person performs a serial reaction with respect to matching individual feedback to the planned action and feedback about the series of actions to the global structure. These findings of altered feedback agree with the hierarchical coding assumption of perception and action made by Hommel et al. (2001) for TEC. Planning action and perceiving action are controlled by the same representation, and this common representation is hierarchically structured. Representation of sequential behavior is typically considered to be hierarchical (e.g., Colwill &
3 There are some exceptions. Hommel (1993) coupled light flash effects at different locations for actions in different locations. Kunde (2001b) used positioned visual effects to the manual responses.

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Rescorla, 1990; Rosenbaum, Kenny, & Derr, 1983). In a simpler version of the hierarchy assumption (Pfordresher, 2005), the levels are supposed to be two tiered, consisting of individual events and their organization. Participants integrate auditory feedback into a plan of action, and they are sensitive to matches between the planned and perceived actions. In a hierarchical representation, a sequence is coded as a series of groups, with each group being more finely divided at a lower level. This group coding is sometimes revealed by the pauses between subgroups of a motor sequence (e.g., Rosenbaum et al., 1983), the RTs to prepare movements for execution (e.g., Klapp, Anderson, & Berrian, 1973), and patterns of errors and transfer from one sequence to another (e.g., Gordon & Meyer, 1987; MacKay, 1982). Explicitly, Pfordresher and his colleagues addressed this issue by disrupting the serial performance through alteration of the structure of the feedback sequence. When the perceived event is matched with one of the to-be-performed actions, it activates the individually associated action representation. However, removing feedback or distorting it by random presentation of tones fails to access any individual or organized representational code of the planned action and hence leads to intact performance. As an altered structure of the auditory effects becomes closer to the organization of a planned action, it activates the higher order of structural representation, such as the planning of the event sequence. Therefore, the global level of mismatch will lead to drastic interference on performance for the case of serial shift. Pfordresher and Palmer (2006) suggested that both past and future events can be simultaneously accessible through the hierarchical representation system, if those events are linked at a higher level. Hoffmann et al. (2001) found that when the keypress responses are assigned compatibly to the response effect, serial responses are faster than when they are assigned in an incompatible manner. For example, responses were faster for the ascending pitch tone effects to the compatibly assigned keypresses from left to right than in mixed RE mapping or descending right-to-left RE mapping. Contingent tone effects only became effective when there was sufficient time for participants to anticipate the next to-beproduced tone before the next response signal was presented. Disruption from distortion of the feedback signals can be found in other domains of motor behavior. One can freely and competently speak without the auditory feedback resulting from selfspeech. However, the presentation of delayed auditory feedback disrupts performance: For example, a 200-ms delay of feedback induces hesitations and repetitions similar to stuttering (MacKay, 1986). Asynchronous feedback induces disturbance of performance in speech (e.g., Howell & Powell, 1987) and tapping (e.g., Chase, Harvey, Standfast, Rapin, & Sutton, 1961). However, elimination of feedback does not seem to impede motor performance for rapid movements. Several studies also showed that participants can point at a target without visual information feedback with only minor reduction of accuracy (e.g., Carlton, 1981). Comparable results also can be found in deafferented insects or animals. Eliminating feedback has been shown to produce negligible disruption of motor behavior in animals (e.g., Bassler, 1983). Destroying sense organs that signal leg position did not produce disruption of walking movements for insects, and monkeys with dorsal root section showed no impairment of motor performance. However, distortion of the sensory feedback provoked drastic disruption of motor performance; for example, when the organs

signaled incorrect forward leg position signals continuously, insects failed to initiate the swing movement of walking (e.g., Bassler, 1977, 1987).

Serial Learning in Animals


Learning of complex mazes, in which different responses are made at different choice points, may be considered a variety of serial learning. Early in this task, animals make incorrect as well as correct responses, and thus response patterns from one trial to the next differ, while, of course, stimuli from trial to trial remain the same. Consequently, early in training response learning is precluded while learning on the basis of stimuli is possible. Later in training, when the animals have learned the task, response learning as well as stimulus learning may occur. The animal literature contains many reports of efforts to determine the extent to which serial responding in complex mazes is due to stimulus learning or response learning (Munn, 1950). This issue has also been raised in experiments involving simpler mazes with a single choice point, most particularly, the cross maze (Restle, 1957). In a cross maze, the animals may be started from the north or the south and required either to turn always to the west (stimulus learning, also called place learning) or to turn to the west when started from the south and to the east when started from the north (response learning). Place learning requires the animals to make two different responses to get to the same place and, therefore, implicates stimulus learning, whereas response learning requires the animals to make the same response (left turn or right turn) at the same choice point. The data from both complex and simpler mazes appear to be consistent. When abundant visual stimulation is available, stimulus learning predominates. When such stimulation is absent, as, for example, when animals are tested under conditions of low illumination, response learning predominates. Whether response learning involves SR or RS relations or both is not clear from these data. In any event, it seems to be generally accepted that whether response learning or stimulus learning predominates in such situations depends on the conditions of the test, many of which are described in Munn (1950) and Restle (1957). The animal literature indicates that both stimulus learning and response learning may occur, and which is more important in a particular case depends on the conditions employed. Though Ziessler (1998; Ziessler & Nattkemper, 2001) has provided evidence that RS learning predominates in many situations used to study human serial learning, the maze research suggests that SS and RR learning may also occur in situations more favorable to those relations.

Action Effect in Choice Reaction-Time Task


Another paradigm used to study the role of action effects in motor control is the CRT task (e.g., Aschersleben & Prinz, 1995; Hommel, 1993). A participant is to select a correct response to a specific stimulus among alternatives and execute it for each trial. Contrary to the serial learning task, a response is not related to the subsequent trial in any systematic manner. Greenwald (1970) suggested that two stages of training and testing of associational knowledge of action and action effect would be adequate to verify ideomotor theory. His suggestion is analogous to the tasks studied by animal learning researchers. It consists of two sessions:

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trainingacquisition phase (SRE relational learning) and test phase (test of acquisition).

Prototypical Two-Stage Action-Effect Procedures


Hommel (1996) had participants perform a speeded CRT task. For a training phase, left (R1) or right (R2) keypresses were made to the letters, O (S1) or X (S2), respectively. The responses were followed by low (E1) or high (E2) pitch tones according to the responses made. By repeated exposure to the stimulusresponse effect in series (S1R1E1 and S2R2E2), participants spontaneously acquired the contingent relations among them. According to Hommel, participants should form an association between the motor pattern underlying the action (r1; denoted as lowercase to represent internal process) and the cognitive representation of the action effect (e1), which is a bidirectional relation (r17 e1). If this association is formed, presentation of one of the effects will prime the activation of e1 and eventually spread the activation to the corresponding motor pattern. To test this facilitation, Hommel provided the high or low pitch tones randomly with the stimulus letters (e.g., S1 E1 or S1 E2). When the tone effects corresponded with the required responses, the keypresses were made faster as predicted, though E1 was task irrelevant and participants were not informed of its purpose. Hommels (1996) study was simple, and he used methodology that captured the gist of the ideomotor hypothesis. However, since each SRE triplet is unique, interpretation of the results is unclear. The association between S and E might affect action selection in the test phase rather than RE learning, as ideomotor theory argues. Therefore, Elsner and Hommel (2001) discarded presentation of unique SRE triplets in training and implemented a free CRT task. Participants were told to respond to a nondiscriminative stimulus (go signal) in training. They were allowed to press keys arbitrarily, left or right, to this go signal, while trying to make each response equally often. The contingent tone effect for each response followed, such as a high pitch tone for a left keypress and a low pitch tone for a right keypress. Thus, participants were prevented from learning unique SR or SE associations; only the RE association was contingent. During the test phase, participants were also required to make a free-choice action to a go signal, and the effect tones were randomly provided with the go signal. The priming effect of taskirrelevant tones was evident in both action-selection speed and the frequency of choosing the contingent action. Participants were more likely to make a compatible response to the task-irrelevant tone effects, although they had never been required to do so before. The priming effect of tones was stable during the test phase, even though the action effects were not continued in that phase. The procedure of a free-choice task for training RE association has been applied in other studies (e.g., Kray, Eenshuistra, Kerstner, Weidema, & Hommel, 2006). Rescorla (1995) trained rats to perform instrumental behavior that was followed by distinct outcomes and tested their associational knowledge. He found that RE association was quite robust, even after extinction procedures.

to the prepared action. Participants were required to make four different keypresses to four colored stimuli. The responses were followed by contingent tone effects, following the n:1 mapping method for which two different responses triggered the same tone. After this training, a response-preparation paradigm was introduced in which a cue informed the participant of the color of the upcoming stimulus, shortly before it appeared. Only 75% of the cues were valid; thus an unexpected color stimulus was presented on 25% of the trials. Kunde et al.s interest was performance on those invalid trials, which revealed how prepared action can be switched to to-be-performed actions by formerly associated tone effects. Two different conditions relating to action effect mapping occurred in invalid cases. For the corresponding condition, the to-be-performed action and cued-action shared the same pitch tone, whereas for the noncorresponding condition, they did not. As implied by the ideomotor principle, participants more easily switched the misinformed movement to the to-be-performed movement when the two resulted in the same tone effects. Kunde et al.s (2002) other experiments also supported the collateral facilitation hypothesis. Participants were required to prepare the cued action to one stimulus, and the next stimulus was presented after various time intervals following the first stimulus. Participants were to make the two responses in series as soon as they saw the second stimulus, and the second stimulus remained visible until the second response was made. When the sequentially executed responses shared the same sensory effect, facilitation was found that was larger when the interval between the two stimuli was short. This outcome implies that the action effects influenced earlier rather than later phases of action preparation.

Redefining Action With Newly Acquired Valence


Previous studies have shown that action effects are automatically acquired and integrated with the action control system by bilateral association of action and contingent effect. Action can be redefined with any perceptual quality or even with abstract emotion through the repeated pairing with specifically designed action effects. A typical Simon task offers a stimulus that has two distinct properties, such as color and location. Participants are to make a choice reaction to one stimulus property, called the target property, and the other property is referred to as task irrelevant. Usually the required action has no overlap with the target property but does with the task-irrelevant property. The activation produced by this latter relation causes some internal competition. For example, a participant is usually required to make spatial keypresses to the color of the stimulus, which is in a left or right location. Performance is better when the stimulus location corresponds with, and activates, the same response as that to the target than when it activates a different response (called the Simon effect; Simon, 1990). Hommel (1996, Experiment 2) introduced a combined version of Simon and action effect tasks. The set-up was similar to a typical Simon task, except that the required response set did not overlap with the stimulus set (positioned color stimuli). The responses were spatially neutral actions such as pressing a key once or twice in response to the color of the stimulus. Otherwise, a contingent action effect overlapped spatially with the property of the stimulus. When a compatible mapping between stimulus and effect occurred, such as left-side effect to the left stimulus, action

Action Effect Impacts Action Preparation


Kunde, Hoffmann, and Zellman (2002) found that execution of an unprepared action was easier if the sensory effect was identical

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initiation was facilitated. Action codes were automatically integrated to the perceivable effect features. Spatially neutral actions were spatialized by repeated pairing with location action effects. This assumption of automatic creation of bilateral associations and strategic application became essential parts of Elsner and Hommels (2001) two-stage model.4 This model adopts assumptions equivalent to Greenwalds (1970) ideomotor principle, which explains how knowledge of the action effect relationship is acquired (Stage 1) and how the anticipatory images exert control over the selection of voluntary actions (Stage 2). The contingent relation between the action and the effect is acquired in Stage 1. Randomly generated action will always lead to a unique and particular sensory feedback. Perceiving several co-occurrences of a self-produced movement and a movement-contingent event leads to an obligatory and spontaneous association between them due to a sort of trace conditioning. The motor pattern is voluntarily selected by activation of the perceptual codes in Stage 2. Though several intentional steps may be necessary to complete activation of the motor code, the spreading of activation in a distributed fashion by an anticipatory process is assumed to occur. However, Hommel (2004) suggested that activation of the motor pattern by way of acquired action effect is intentional and guided by context. Hommel (2004) developed a manual version of the Stroop task combined with an action effect task. During the learning phase, participants made left and right keypresses to letter stimuli within a gray frame. After a correct response, the color of the target letter changed to provide an action effect. Each keypress mapped to a contingent action effect, for example, right keypress mapped to the red effect and left keypress to the green effect. In the test phase, the target was presented with a color frame. Although participants were informed that the color frame was irrelevant, the color facilitated the action with which it had been coupled previously. Through the repeated experience of action and contingent color effects, the color-relating event became an efficient prime to induce spatial action, which Hommel called coloring an action. After the coloring of an action, participants were introduced to a manual version of the Stroop task in Experiment 2. The question was whether action coding in terms of color-related events is automatic or strategic. In the test phase, participants pressed a left or right key to the color of the color word, the two of which were congruent or incongruent. There were three color effect conditions: compatible (e.g., left keypress to red color produced a red color patch), incompatible (e.g., left keypress to red color produced a green color patch), and control without color effects. Only facilitation from the compatible RE mapping was found: RT was shorter in the compatible condition than in the other conditions, which did not differ. If action effects automatically reidentify the action in terms of the color, the incompatible color effect condition should show interference of similar size to the facilitation found for the compatible condition. But if use of the action effect for action selection is strategic, performance should be affected only when the action effect is helpful. Hommel concluded that acquisition of the action effect relation occurs automatically. In contrast, activation of a relevant action code is context specific and strategic. The Stroop effect was found in the incompatible color effect and control conditions but not in the condition in which compatible color effects were provided after the keypresses, with shorter RTs for both congruent and incongruent trials.

Hommel (2004) explained that acquisition of the relation between action and its color effect causes participants to redefine their actions in a less linguistic way in terms of color, which keeps linguistic distractors out of the processing pathway and renders them ineffective (Hommel, 2004, p. 83). This process is not semantically mediated, since the Stroop effect was produced when congruent color words were presented as action effects instead of color patches in Experiment 3. Figure 6 provides an illustration of how color-relating events acquire almost equal ability to induce spatial action as a spatial stimulus does. Mainly two types of feedback are produced (see Figure 6A). One is any directional property of feedback that occurs on the left or right from a visual or tactile medium. The other is artificially provided by the color effect. An association of the action and its perceivable effects is created spontaneously by overlapping two events temporally. Hommel (2004) wrote,
If people have no means of controlling the way they code their actions, the left-hand action, say, would always be coded as both left and blue, so that left stimuli and blue stimuli would make equally good action primes. However, given the finding that instructing people in a particular fashion can make them code a left-hand action as RIGHT, and vice versa (Hommel, 1993), we need to assume that actors have considerable control over how actions are coded. If so, participants in the present experiments must have had a choice between attending either the location features or the color features of their key presses (i.e., of the key press-contingent perceptual events; see Hommel, 1993, 2003). (p. 85)

The color effect codes are automatically associated with the motor codes. Once the bilateral association is formed, a left or right action is assumed to activate both codes of color and location (see Figure 6B). The opposite direction of activation is also possible: color or location events can trigger left or right motor patterns to some degree. Action acquires two types of valence, one being the original directional feature and the other the color, but participants can selectively attend to the properties of their actions. If a required task does not relate to a color event at all, there is no reason to switch on the color domain. However, for Hommels study, participants performed a manual version of Stroop task, which necessarily required color-related processing. For this case, participants should prevent some degree of activation from the color domain to make a correct manual response. Facilitation from the compatible RE mapping and no impact from the incompatible mapping support this idea. Beckers, De Houwer, and Eelen (2002) reported a similar phenomenon in which action is redefined with an action-irrelevant feature by a newly acquired action effect association. They adopted the affective Simon task originated by De Houwer and Eelen (1998), who found that responding was facilitated when participants were to say Negative for a noun when the noun had negative rather than positive meaning and to say Positive for the opposite situation. Beckers et al. told participants to make a free-choice reaction by moving a key upward or downward to a go signal, while keeping the frequency of each response approximately the same. One of the two responses triggered aversive
4 Note how this assumption is different from the view of Ziessler et al. (2004), who stated that the process for acquisition and application of action effect is quite selective and strategic to the context.

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physical property of the response effect but also by a more abstract semantic feature that was not directly observable. Once feedback features are integrated into a common cognitive structure, the activation of a certain motor code is even generalized to semantically related actions. Let us assume that whenever a spatially neutral keypress is made, a left-positioned visual stimulus is presented. By this procedure, a neutral keypress acquires the leftness value. The activation of leftness code is not limited to the specific context of the setting in which the original relation was established. If any left context is given to a participant such as use of the left hand, or turning to the left or even saying left, the action code of leftness will be activated to some degree.

Spreading Activation of the Acquired Valence


Hommel et al. (2003) carried out a free CRT task for an acquisition phase in which each keypress led to a contingent word effect. Words were category names (e.g., animal) or exemplars (e.g., dog). After participants completed the acquisition trials, a test phase of forced-choice reaction task was introduced. When the response effect was compatible with the stimulus for the test phase, pronounced facilitation was found, as in prior studies. This effect generalized to other exemplars in the same category (e.g., cat) and to words referring to a perceptually similar attribute in another category (e.g., circle for orange). Hommel et al. concluded that a word in the acquisition phase can spread its activation to similar words, allowing an extra relation between newly activated words and a particular motor command to be formed. Thus, the association with similar concept and a particular action is created automatically in the acquisition phase.

Endogenous Activation of Anticipatory Image: ActionEffect Compatibility


After establishing a bidirectional association of action and effect, an actor can initiate the voluntary action by anticipation of the actions effects. The facilitation from e1 to r1, e1 3 r1 (action selection by the anticipatory process), is the most distinguishing assumption of the ideomotor principle. Greenwald (1970) proposed that a sensory image of the effect is incorporated into the ideomotor mechanism so that this internalized image of the sensory feedback exerts control over the action rather than control being exerted by the sensory feedback itself. Once a person accesses this image or thinks of an intended effect, it primes the action to some degree and the action will follow. Therefore, the ideomotor principle works as an endogenous process, not like an exogenous cue-driven process. However, this endogenous process is not addressed within the two-phase action effect paradigm previously introduced. Elsner and Hommel (2001) physically offered an action effect as a redundant but task-irrelevant stimulus in the test phase. Their study provides evidence that a participant acquires a certain association between the response and the postresponse effect but for the endogenous characteristic of the ideomotor principle, according to which action is generated via access to the image of the sensory consequence. As noted by Kunde (2001a), Ideomotor hypothesis explicitly claims that voluntary movements are selected by future (anticipated) but not by present (perceived) effects (p. 387).

Figure 6. Illustration of how bilateral association between action and effect is formed and finally controls the keypresses. Panel A shows that performing keypresses can bring about two different action effects, the location and the color. After several trials of consequent action effect, performing the action would bring about the anticipatory effects of location and color, and any perceivable stimulus that relates to a certain color or location also would trigger a certain movement, which is sketched in Panel B. Reprinted from Coloring an Action: Intending to Produce Color Events Eliminates the Stroop Effect, by B. Hommel, 2004, Psychological Research, 68, p. 86. Copyright 2004 by Springer.

electrocutaneous feedback. In a subsequent forced-choice task phase, participants were to decide whether a word was a noun or adjective with the same response set (upward or downward). When the words affective connotation corresponded to the key responses valence acquired during the training phase, initiation of a response was facilitated. These studies imply that any distal effects can be coupled with the action. An intended action can be elicited not only by the

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Kunde (2001b, 2003; Kunde et al., 2002, 2004) sought to assess whether this endogenous anticipation indeed occurs. If the anticipated image works as a mental cue, this cue also may have similar features to those of a physically presented cue. For instance, when there is dimensional overlap between a response and the following effect, the anticipatory process will be facilitated by automatic priming of the action in a way similar to SRC (see, e.g., Kornblum, Hasbroucq, & Osman, 1990; Proctor & Wang, 1997), which results in RE compatibility. In Kundes (2001b) Experiment 1, participants made four different aligned keypresses to four differently colored circles. For the corresponding RE mapping condition, the horizontally aligned box on a monitor compatible with the location of the response was filled with a white color as an effect. For noncorresponding RE mapping, the adjacent box was filled with white, which was not compatible with the response location. RE mapping condition was fixed within blocks of trials, so that participants could reliably predict the spatial response effect within each block. RT was 21 ms shorter for the corresponding condition than for the noncorresponding condition. Kunde reported that the endogenous activation is time consuming, finding a larger RE compatibility effect for the longer RTs in a distribution. RE compatibility has been shown to be replicable in many task variations (e.g., Kunde et al., 2004). For instance, RE compatibility has been applied to nonspatial dimensions of RE mapping. Responses were facilitated when the intensity of the keypresses corresponded to the loudness of the tone effect (Kunde, 2001b, Experiment 2). An RE mapping effect was found in the temporal domain as well: RT was facilitated when short-duration keypresses were followed by short tones and long-duration keypresses by long tones (Kunde, 2003). Other domains of mapping, such as colornaming response and visual color effect (either color name or colored color name; Koch & Kunde, 2002) and typing response and corresponding letter effect (Rieger, 2007), showed significant RE compatibility effects of 10 ms to 80 ms. Koch and Kunde (2002) extended Kundes (2001b) RE compatibility idea to the abstract property of RE relation. They tested whether the response also could be facilitated by a conceptually shared effect. Participants said color-word names (blue, yellow, green, or pink) in response to arbitrarily mapped visual digits (1, 2, 3, or 4). The action effects were colored color words (e.g., green written in green), colored Xs (XXXX in green), or a white-colored word (for Experiment 2). Results showed an RE effect of 80 ms between compatible and incompatible mapping. When the RE effect was compared across effect-type conditions, the largest RE effect was found for the colored-color word condition, with an intermediate RE effect for the color-word condition and the least RE effect for colored Xs condition. The authors concluded that responses can be facilitated by mutual priming of verbal and physical properties of the effect. In their Experiment 2, Kunde et al. (2004) explored the question of whether the action effect influenced an early process of action control (selection) or a later process (initiation). On two thirds of the trials, a valid color cue preceded the target by randomly varied stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), indicating the next response. For the remaining trials, a neutral cue was presented. The RE compatibility effect was still evident when the action was cued sufficiently far in advance to allow selection to be completed. If the action effect mediates only the selection process, the RE

compatibility effect should have been eliminated at long SOAs. Thus, Kunde et al. suggested that response selection and initiation are not independent but are different phases of a single process for activation of anticipatory effect codes. If the action effect condition mediates the selection process at all, the RE compatibility effect should at least be reduced at long SOAs. However, results showed a constant effect size, suggesting that the effect condition only affects the initiation process. The authors of the studies reported pronounced learning improvement by a natural RE mapping. The issue of whether a participant can selectively attend more to the natural mapping of RE than to an arbitrarily offered mapping was raised by Hommel (1993). He showed that the performance of RE mapping can be reversed by a task instruction; thus, the compatible RE mapping was not always superior to the incompatible mapping. Participants were required to make spatial keypresses to different pitch tones presented to the left or right, and a contingent light flash on the opposite side followed the response. For one condition, participants were told to press left and right keys to the tones; for another condition, they were told to produce left and right light onsets. In the latter case, the Simon effect reversed to favor noncorresponding keypresses. This finding reveals that the activation of the action code is dependent on the actors goals and that the process is intentional rather than spontaneous. Wang, Proctor, and Pick (2007) also found that the Simon effect was eliminated when a postresponse cursor movement was opposite to the direction of the hand movement of a participant using a wheel control. Evidence suggested that some participants encoded their actions in terms of cursor movements, whereas others coded their actions relative to the hand movements. Wang et al. concluded that the cursor movement provided an alternative option for coding the actions.

Action Effect in Animal Learning: Differential Outcome Paradigm


Though the experimental paradigm of manipulation of SRE triplets is relatively new in human learning, researchers in animal learning studies have used this paradigm to test differential outcome effects for many years (e.g., Rescorla & Colwill, 1989). The procedure of the differential outcome task paradigm is comparable to the simple version of a CRT task used to measure priming effects of sensorial feedback. Two discriminative stimuli, S1 and S2, which signal contingent responses, R1 and R2, are presented. When each response brings different outcomes, O1 and O2, respectively, the discrimination learning is typically completed faster than when the responses are reinforced by the same outcomes (e.g., DeLong & Wasserman, 1981; Fedorchak & Bolles, 1986). Meck (1985) conducted a study using two-phase procedures of training and testing,5 as in action effect studies. For training, rats were conditioned to press a left or right lever for each trial. No cue
Meck (1985) used three procedure phases: pretraining, postreinforcement signal training, and prereinforcement signal training. The pretraining phase was to adjust rats to the box environment and the lever-pressing tasks. Postreinforcement and prereinforcement signal training were similar to the two-phase procedure devised by Elsner and Hommel (2001). To avoid confusion, we refer to the postreinforcement signal training phase as the training phase and the prereinforcement signal training as the test phase here.
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was provided to indicate which lever was to be pressed. The lever to be considered correct was determined randomly on each trial, with the probability of each lever being correct set at 50%. Each correct response was reinforced with a food pellet that was accompanied by a redundant noise signal. For instance, a 2-s noise signal was given for a right response and an 8-s noise signal for a left response for one group. After performing this discrimination task in the training phase, the rats received a test phase in which they were to learn a new relation between tone and the spatial lever pressing. The short or long noise signals were provided as indicators of the correct lever to be pressed. The rats performed this new discrimination task better when the relation between the press and the tone was consistent with the prior task than when it was the reverse. Meck concluded that the rats formed a bidirectional association between a particular lever press and a postreinforcement signal. He suggested that rats may associate two events that occur within a brief time period as an adaptive way to predict either event. Historically, the role of reinforcer or action outcome in animal learning was treated as stamping in an association between stimulus and response. According to the law of effect (Thorndike, 1905), the SR association was solely responsible for the occurrence of the instrumental response, and learning of the reinforcer (O) or the relation between the response and the reinforcing outcome (RO) was not a theoretical interest. However, Spence (1956) suggested that instrumental learning consists of two factors, Thorndikian SR association and reward expectancy from a stimulus by SO association. According to modern two-process theory (Rescorla & Solomon, 1967), the stimulus (S) in the presence of which the instrumental response is reinforced is associated with the response outcome (O) through Pavlovian conditioning. Through this SO association, S comes to motivate the instrumental behavior by activation of a central emotional state. This expectancy is reinforced also by ER (expectancyresponse) links. The nature of the emotional state or motivation will depend on the nature of the reinforcer, which is what Mowrer (1960) more generally called hope. How could hope or some other Pavlovian expectancy motivate instrumental behavior? Rescorla and Solomon (1967) pointed out that if a Pavlovian expectancy motivates instrumental behavior, then the presentation of a Pavlovian conditional stimulus should alter the course of instrumentally reinforced responding. Thus, the rate of an instrumental response will be modulated by the presentation of a classically conditioned reinforcer. The differential outcome paradigm in animal learning reveals that the reinforcer (O) is an active participant in integration of the instrumental association. Colwill and Rescorla (1985, 1986, 1990) found that instrumental behavior results from the formation of an association between a response (R) and its contingent outcome (O). They used a devaluation of outcome procedure to show that the responses are differentially associated with the outcome. Outcome-specific learning implies the presence of associations between responses and outcomes. Rescorla (1991) also suggested that the strength of an association between R and O can be modulated by selectively pairing the response with the same outcome or a different outcome in the test phase. Each stimulus activates a unique representation of outcome and finally induces the appropriate response. This bidirectional RO association is supposed to be a motivator of the differential outcome effect.

Trapold and Overmier (1972) accounted for the effect in a similar manner. According to them, the co-occurrence of S1 and O1 or S2 and O2 makes unique associations between them. These differential outcomes permit participants to anticipate differently for each stimulus, E1 or E2. The distinctive anticipation to each stimulus also plays a discriminative cue to initiate an action. Thus, discrimination learning involves both the exogenous cue of S and endogenous activation of E. In the respect that a different anticipation is conditioned to each response, this account is strikingly close to the ideomotor principle in human behavior. Though Hommel (1996) pointed out that the Thorndikian formulation of instrumental behavior is considerably different from the action effect model in human behavior, some formulations more analogous to the ideomotor principle can be found in modern animal models (e.g., Trapold & Overmier, 1972). Bidirectional RO association assumption and the modulation of the response pattern by the outcome condition are similar to the ideomotor principle in the sense that only an RO association is required to carry out an intended behavior.

Stimulus-Driven Action
In this section, we offer varied examples of action control modulation by environmental cues. A perceiver can detect a dynamic action feature inherent in a static display or comprehend another persons action by mirroring that action in her or his representation of action production. Mere observation of dynamic action also affects the control of action. Responses can be activated intentionally or automatically by exogenous events. Contrary to the action effect studies described previously, the studies described in this section did not offer an arbitrary action effect such as a tone or visual stimulus. Otherwise, the studies demonstrated that an action is facilitated by a display pattern that is similar to the consequent feedback of the action.

Ideomotor Compatibility
Greenwald (1970) suggested that presentation of a stimulus that resembles the following actions sensory feedback can activate the action itself; thus, the selection process is bypassed. Even without the acquisition stage of relating actions to outcomes (Stage 1), a very special stimulus can prompt an action. Put another way, it can be assumed that Stage 1 is completed already as a consequence of experiencing the environment during an observers past. Thus, the generation of the anticipatory image for its perceptual consequence is a necessary and sufficient process to initiate the intended action. If the stimulus exactly corresponds to the perceptual image of the action outcome, the response code does not need to be regenerated; thus, the time to select the required response code is reduced. In this sense, Greenwald proposed that the ideomotor principle can contribute to the phenomena of SRC (for review, see Proctor & Vu, 2006). Greenwald (1970) suggested,
SR compatibility facilitates response selection by minimizing the time required for access to an image of the correct response. This argument especially merits consideration in explaining effects of compatibility produced by spatial mapping of response onto stimuli, since, in these cases, it seems unwarranted to claim that highly practiced relations are involved. (p. 91)

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Prinz (1997) and Beckers et al. (2002) also suggested that SRC is the phenomenon that is most closely related to the common coding system. If one of the properties of the response is congruent to a property of the stimulus physically or conceptually, responding to that stimulus is facilitated more than when the relation between a stimulus and a response is not congruent. Greenwald (1972) introduced the term ideomotor (IM) compatibility for SR relations in which a stimulus closely resembles the sensory feedback from the required response. For example, saying a to the auditory sound a is typically categorized as an IMcompatible task. This concept is also partly echoed by later researchers who advocated the common coding hypothesis. For example, Hommel et al. (2001) claimed that a person can activate the action code when he or she perceives an event that resembles the to-be-performed action effect. However, the boundary of the IM-compatibility concept is not settled. IM compatibility has been treated as an absolutely different quality from SRC in some literature (e.g., ten Hoopen et al., 1982), but occasionally it has been defined as a special case of SRC that is due to similar factors as other SRC effects. For example, Greenwald (1972) identified IM compatibility as an extreme end of the compatibility continuum. He applied the term low IM compatible to describe a task requiring participants to make left or right manual movements to the auditory stimuli left or right in contrast with the term high IM compatible applied to describe a task requiring participants to repeat the vocal responses left and right to the auditory stimuli left or right. Greenwald (2003) also claimed later that even an IM-compatible task still requires a cost-consuming selection process if the level of preactivation for the action code is subthreshold. However, if preparation of the action code is largely complete, the presentation of the stimulus triggers the action without an extra cost of response selection. This type of ideomotor approach, which describes IM compatibility as an extreme form of SRC, is called a weak version of IM compatibility (Koch & Kunde, 2002). But Greenwald also put forward a strong version of the ideomotor mechanism (Greenwald, 1970; Greenwald & Shulman, 1973), in which IM compatibility is regarded as a unique concept from typical SRC. An IM-compatible task does not require transformation of the stimulus codes to the to-be-performed actions because action is encoded in terms of its anticipatory feedback. Thus, any signals that closely resemble the feedback will activate the corresponding response code directly. Greenwald and Shulman (1973) had participants perform two IM-compatible tasks in a dual-task setting. Task 1 (T1) required a leftright joystick movement corresponding to the left or right direction in which an arrow pointed, and Task 2 (T2) required vocalization of a or b corresponding to the name of a spoken letter. The SOA between the stimuli for T1 and T2 was varied. Typically, when the SOA is short, the T2 performance is more disrupted than when the SOA is long or when two tasks are performed alone (e.g., Pashler, 1994). This phenomenon, called the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect, is often attributed to a responseselection bottleneck. Greenwald and Shulman expected that the PRP effect would be eliminated when both tasks were IM-compatible and did not require response selection. Their Experiment 2 showed no PRP effect, leading them to conclude that the limited-capacity translation process from stimulus to response is bypassed for IM-compatible tasks.

However, several other researchers have not found perfect time sharing with two IM-compatible tasks (e.g., Lien, McCann, Ruthruff, & Proctor, 2005; Lien, Proctor, & Allen, 2002; Lien, Proctor, & Ruthruff, 2003; Shin, Cho, Lien, & Proctor, 2007). Also, it is unclear why one IM-compatible task paired with a non-IMcompatible task would produce impairment in participants who are performing the two tasks at the same time if an IM-compatible task does not require any selection process. Shin and Proctor (2008) suggested that the operational use of IM-compatible tasks in previous studies was not adequate to assess strong IM compatibility and showed that the visualmanual tasks did not activate an action code completely and automatically. CRT tasks usually show an increasing pattern of RT as a function of the number of SR alternatives (Hick, 1952), which is attributed mainly to an increase in response-selection difficulty (e.g., Usher, Olami, & McClelland, 2002). Shin and Proctor (2008) varied the number of SR alternatives (two or four) for a visualmanual task paired with a two-choice auditoryvocal task in the PRP paradigm. RT was longer with four visual choices than with two, and this lengthening of RT for the four-choice task increased the size of PRP effect for the auditoryvocal task. The results demonstrate that the visual manual task still requires limited-capacity response-selection processes and is not IM compatible in the strong sense. IM-compatible setting of a visual-manual task. Researchers have made several attempts to provide a body-related gesture as a stimulus and then investigate the execution of the corresponding action. Brass, Bekkering, Wohlschlager, and Prinz (2000) sug gested that observing hand action evokes a corresponding response to some degree. They required participants to make an index-finger movement, either lifting or tapping, in response to a go signal, which was a lifting or tapping hand gesture. In one trial block, a participant lifted his index finger to the go signal, as in a simple reaction task. Brass and his colleagues used dynamic images of finger movements for a go signal, which were either lifting or tapping movements of index finger. The two go signals occurred at random in one block. When an upward moving finger signaled participants to initiate a lifting movement, the response was significantly faster than when a downward moving finger did. The SR compatibility effect was larger for slower mean RT quintiles, implying that the process would be time consuming. Brass et al. (2000) suspected that the effect might have resulted from spatial direction of a go-signal image rather than being triggered by similar action of the finger movement. Thus, they added another condition, which provided a moving object for a go signal. To achieve identical movements of object and hand, they digitally recorded a black square marked on a finger engaged in lifting or tapping and then erased all but the black square from the picture. Hence, the objects moved upward or downward without meaningful human gestures of lifting or tapping. A more pronounced SRC effect was found for the hand gestures than for the moving object condition. Brass et al. noted that the SRC effect came from two types of mechanisms, movement direction (upward/downward) and movement type (lifting/tapping). When the two types of compatibility are achieved in one stimulus conjointly, as is the case for observation of finger movements, performance can be more easily facilitated than if only one source of information is available, as for moving objects. The facilitation from movement direction (upward/downward) compatibility existed for fast and slow responses, suggesting that processing of spatial

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direction was simple and built up at an early stage. However, the SRC effect for finger movement (lifting/tapping) observation increased as RT increased. Consequently, Brass et al. proposed that the processing of finger movements is more complex and time consuming for effectively initiating action. Brass et al. (2000) conducted another experiment, using flipped hand gestures as go signals to separate the movement type and direction from finger movement picture. For a flipped picture, the experimenters achieved the upward direction of finger movement by tapping gestures and the downward direction of finger movement by lifting gestures, which were opposite to the normal picture. Therefore, if the compatibility effects of their Experiments 1 and 2 were primarily caused by the directional component of the finger images, the compatibility effect should have been present only when the direction of the finger image corresponded with the action direction. The results showed that initiation of lifting or tapping movements was facilitated when the same body gestures were offered even with the opposite direction of movement, though the size of the effect was smaller than with an unflipped go signal. Brass et al. concluded that an ideomotor kind of SR arrangement was realized through the use of simulated real action for a go signal, and they posited that this arrangement is closer to Greenwalds notion of IM compatibility. Two sources of facilitation mechanism, from movement type and direction, were executed simultaneously. When the required performance was a similar action with same effector, the body-related gesture primarily affected the corresponding action. Other authors (e.g., Hommel & Lippa, 1995) have assumed that two different reference systems are processed to represent the spatial dimension. Klatzky (1998) distinguished an egocentric reference frame, in which locations are represented relative to the perceivers perspective, from an allocentric reference frame, in which locations are represented relative to an external referent object. Analogous to these reference systems, there may be two different mechanisms to represent a humans body movement direction. The egocentric system processes the spatial information given by others body movements with respect to the movements generated by the self. The allocentric system can process the same information in terms of changes of position in the environment. When an individual observes others body movements, one information source from the egocentric system (e.g., lifting or tapping) and another from the allocentric system (e.g., downward or upward direction) may be processed simultaneously. As shown by Brass, Bekkering, and Prinz (2001), the egocentric information is primarily used when the stimulus is a human-bodyrelated movement and the response requires similar movement. A dynamic visual stimulus of moving the index finger was very similar to the required action of moving the index finger in the respect to body topology. Thus, this task required the same reference system for perception and action, and the stimulus almost perfectly matched the representation of the action that the participant intended to perform. A biological motion picture might bring about the corresponding action code more automatically than a spatial feature in the object stimulus, since a picture containing lift or tap movement shares more common features than a simple spatial cue. Sturmer, Aschersleben, and Prinz (2000) also reported that observing a task-irrelevant stimulus of grasping or spreading gestures of hand can facilitate corresponding grasping or spreading action in a Simon-like task. However, Jansson, Wilson, Williams,

and Mon-Williams (2007) criticized the methods used by Brass et al., since their biological stimulus was more salient than the object motion of a dot. When Jansson et al. manipulated the object motion as a pen tapping/lifting scene and compared the performance with a finger tapping/lifting scene, they did not observe the stimulus type effect or any interaction with the stimulus type. In their other subsequent experiments, they did not find any performance difference for responses to the biological motion or biologically generated motion compared with responses to the object motion. Body-related spatial information does not always automatically facilitate a corresponding action. Ottoboni, Tessari, Cubeli, and Umilta (2005) reported that a handedness picture (see Figure 7) did ` not produce a Simon effect. However, if a hand picture was provided with forearm extension (see Figure 8), a Simon effect was found. A regular Simon effect was obtained for the back view, and a reverse effect was obtained for the palm view. Ottoboni et al. concluded that what is automatically coded in the hand stimulus is sidedness, not handedness. In their experiments, participants made keypresses with the two index fingers; thus, their hand positions corresponded to the back view. When the hand views were presented without extension of the forearm, the views of the back of the left hand and the palm of right hand looked similar (see Figure 7). This could cause participants to ignore any meaningful information from the two pictures or a reverse effect from palm view could cancel out some inherent facilitation from a corresponding back view display. For the handedness picture with extension of forearm, the sidedness cue was provided by the joint angle of hand and forearm. A participant could process this clear information automatically, no matter which handedness is shown in the picture. Regardless, the results from Ottoboni et al. (2005) seem to contradict those of Brass et al. (2001), who found that a bodyrelated motion picture facilitated the same action even when the direction of movement in the picture was opposite to the required hand action. If a body-related visual stimulus automatically activates corresponding movements, Ottoboni et al. should have found facilitation from the palm view version of the hand picture, but they did not. However, the participants task in their study was to make a left or right keypress to the color of dots, and the hand picture was irrelevant; this task is in contrast to Brass et al.s task in which participants were required to perform an action identical

Figure 7. Hand stimuli. Reprinted from Is Handedness Recognition Automatic? A Study Using a Simon-Like Paradigm, by G. Ottoboni, A. Tessari, R. Cubeli, and C. Umilta, 2005, Journal of Experimental Psychol` ogy: Human Perception and Performance, 31, p. 782. Copyright 2005 by the American Psychological Association.

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Figure 8. Hand stimuli with extended forearms. Reprinted from Is Handedness Recognition Automatic? A Study Using a Simon-Like Paradigm, by G. Ottoboni, A. Tessari, R. Cubeli, and C. Umilta, 2005, Journal ` of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31, p. 782. Copyright 2005 by the American Psychological Association.

reported that RT is independent of the number of SR alternatives, provided that the SR mapping is maximally compatible and selection of the effector is predetermined, as in a pointing task.7 Participants making aimed movements to the target did not exhibit prolonged RT when the number of alternative targets was increased. Ten Hoopen et al. (1982) concluded that IM compatibility may depend on a high degree of perceptual similarity between stimuli and responses. In their study, the number of alternatives effect disappeared only when vibratory stimuli were presented to the effectors with high frequency and amplitude. They considered only the vibrations that stimulated the same receptors as those stimulated by pressing a response key to be truly IM compatible. It is noteworthy that for the tasks described by Wright et al. and ten Hoopen et al., the same reference system was used for perception and action.

Ideomotor Action
When a person observes other peoples rapid and intense actions, her or his body tends to move involuntarily or even countervoluntarily. For example, when viewing a golfer missing a putt, the viewers body tends to lean in a certain direction. As a narrowly defined term, the concept of ideomotor action was introduced as an action that tends to arise from watching anothers performance (Carpenter, 1874; Prinz, 1987). Ideomotor action can be classified into two categories, perceptually and intentionally induced actions (De Maeght & Prinz, 2004; Knuf et al., 2001; Prinz, 1987). Knuf et al. (2001) considered perceptually induced ideomotor action to be movement that carries on the inherent inducing power in the perceptual representation of the scene, with an observer tending to perform movements that would lead to the continuing motion. Thus, the example of an observer of a missed putt tending to lean in the direction of the golf balls trajectory falls in this category. The other category of ideomotor action is intentionally induced movement, in which an observer acts in an intentional way to seemingly affect the action in a perceived scene. For example, an observer of a missed putt tends to move his or her limbs involuntarily in the direction of the desired goal, as if trying to change the direction of the ball. Knuf et al. termed this action as an idle-running instrumental act, since the action cannot be instrumental at all. To identify which ideomotor action is primarily used in involuntary action during observation of movement scene, Knuf et al. (2001) used tasks that were similar to playing billiards and bowling. In the task similar to billiards-playing in their Experiment 1, a participant was able to see a ball approaching a target, which the ball either hit or missed. The participant was told to perform an intervening action to make hitting the target with a ball more probable. In the ball-control condition, the participant hit the ball
Rosenbaum et al. (1990) demonstrated that voluntary movement is goal driven by citing ideomotor theory. They suggested that action planning is modulated by minimization of conflict in the end-state posture. Participants grasped an object with initial awkwardness of posture to allow a final comfortable posture. 7 But several other investigators also have reported that a pointing task was affected by degree of choice (e.g., Lamb & Kaufman, 1965). The ineffectiveness of a number of alternatives seems to be restricted to limited stimulusresponse arrangements, even for a pointing task.
6

to the go-signal picture. Some researchers have found that an image of ones body parts needs to be rotated for participants to identify the side of the body to which a disoriented body part belongs (e.g., Parsons, 1987; Sekiyama, 1982). Thus, a participant from Ottoboni et al.s task should have tried a mental rotation to identify the handedness of the picture, especially for a palm view to match the participants current hand position, which from the participants perspective was a back view. Participants might give more attention to the clear spatial cue such as the angle of the forearm rather than attending to the handedness cue, which may take longer time to identify it. Other examples of IM compatibility. In a CRT task, different reference frames typically are used for perceiving and acting. For example, in a standard task with visual stimuli and keypress responses, perception for stimuli on a vertically oriented monitor occurs in the vertical plane, and action occurs with keys on the horizontal plane. A participant must parse the spatial components of the visual display and transform the resulting spatial representation into the spatial property of the to-be-performed action. However, aimed movements such as saccades, pointing, catching, or grasping occur within the same physical reference system as that for perception. In terms of low-level processing, aimed movements may also require a separate spatial reference system. With regard to kinesthesia, an agent is to perform a one-to-one transformation from an object identification in a given visual display to a motor pattern to be performed. However, the aimed movement is supposed to share a common spatial reference with perception of the visual display in regard to a high-level, modality-free representational structure. According to the ideomotor principle, an action is assumed to be represented by its goal state. Thus, planning of movement in terms of kinesthetic force is not an ideomotor issue, and trajectory processing of the aimed movement is not a crucial parameter, but the final position of the action is.6 Thus, when displays and controls are eventually overlapped in the same physical location, a participant does not need to parse the spatial property to transform perception to action. Several researchers who have attempted to realize IM compatibility have used a physically common reference system for displays and controls. Wright, Marino, Belovsky, and Chubb (2007)

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using a cue controlled by the joystick, and the ball was to hit the right cushion first and then the top cushion before finally hitting the target. In the target-control condition, the participant was to move the target horizontally to increase the chance of it being hit, but this intervening action was to be completed before the ball hit the top cushion (Figure 9). Knuf et al.s (2001) Experiment 1 revealed intentionally induced movement in the target-control condition. Participants attempted to shift the target toward the ball even after the ball bounced off the top cushion, thus the instrumental action was not effective at all. However, this intentionally induced movement was not found in the ball-control condition, and perceptually induced movement was not observed in any condition. Knuf et al. found that the instrumental action seemed to be continuously effective for the target-control condition, but the intervening action of the ballcontrolled condition was quite temporary, effective only when the cue hit the ball in the first scene. In Experiments 2 and 3, Knuf et al. employed a bowling game. Instrumental movements by hands and noninstrumental movements by feet and hands were measured on each trial. Results showed that participants made systematic hand shifts to increase hit rate. These induced movements were carried out to control the ball in the ball condition and the target in the target condition. Evidence of perceptually induced movement was fairly weak for hand movements. For head and foot movements, both perceptual and intentional inducements were found, and intentional induction was guided by the ball trajectory for both conditions. The authors suggested that noninstrumental movements were mainly controlled by the most dynamic component in the perceived scene, the balls movement. In conclusion, Knuf et al. contrasted two ideomotor action principles. Perceptually induced movements are guided by overlapped features between the perceivable event and the to-be-programmed action. Intentional

induction relies on the overlapped feature between goal representation and action. De Maeght and Prinz (2004) extended Knuf et al.s (2001) study to observation of others actions so that the task allowed assessment of ideomotor action in passive observer mode. By limiting the active role of the player in the task, they also prevented intentional inertia, in which initial intention is maintained after the action is completed. They designed two combined events in one task. One was a bowling-like task, similar to that in Knuf et al.s study, and the other was a traveling-ball-tracking task. For the bowling-like task (player mode), the participant was to intervene in the action of a ball hitting a target by moving either the ball (ball condition) or the target (target condition) via a joystick. After the instrumental maneuver, participants were required to track a traveling ball vertically using a joystick while observing an alleged player perform bowling (observer mode). Though participants were required to move the joystick vertically along with the vertical position of the ball, the interest in measurement was the horizontal dimension, specifically the pattern of the offset from the center line produced by hand movements. If action induction occurs when a participant perceives a dynamic bowling scene performed by an alleged player, then systematic drift should appear in the horizontal dimension. Results showed that, for the observer mode, strong perceptual induction was reported for both effectors. When a participant was not allowed to experience player mode and was instructed to perform the tracking task later (pure observer mode), both effectors exhibited perceptual induction. Intentional induction was exhibited only in the ball condition and only for the hand effector. De Maeght and Prinzs study is in agreement with Knuf et al.s (2001) study in showing that the strong intentional induction from instrumental and noninstrumental effectors always seemed to be captured by the dynamic property in the perceivable scene (ball trajectory).

Imitation
Prinz (1987) included imitation of others movements in the category of ideomotor action. However, imitation itself includes much broader research topics than ideomotor action. Review of most imitation-related studies is out of the scope of this article (for a review, see Meltzoff & Prinz, 2002), but several interesting results about imitation will be described. Among those is that even 1-day-old infants can imitate buccal and manual gestures of an adult actor (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977), suggesting that the ability to imitate is innate. To account for imitative behavior, researchers have proposed two complementary models. One approach is the direct mapping view, which assumes a supramodal representational system for perception features and action features. TEC (Hommel et al., 2001), active intermodal mapping theory (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977), and mirror neuron accounts (Buxbaum, Kyle, & Menon, 2005) are typical examples of the direct mapping hypothesis. Perceiving or imitating human body action is known to be special because of its unique neurological pattern (e.g., Iacoboni et al., 2005), though the localization of brain functioning is still unsettled (e.g., Bekkering, Brass, Woschina, & Jacobs, 2005). Some researchers have found that neurons in the ventral premotor cortex (area F5) in monkeys, now called mirror neurons, are involved in

Figure 9. Paradigm developed to study ideomotor movements (Experiment 1). The task was either to drive the ball on a suitable course by the cue (so that it could hit the target) or to shift the target to the left or the right (so that it could be hit by the ball). During the induction phase (larger dots), joystick movements were ineffective (i.e., noninstrumental) in both task conditions. Reprinted from An Analysis of Ideomotor Action, by L. Knuf, G. Aschersleben, and W. Prinz, 2001, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, p. 781. Copyright 2001 by the American Psychological Association.

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action comprehension and imitative behavior (e.g., Rizzolatti, 2005; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Galleses, & Fogassi, 1996). These neurons were reported to be activated not only from the execution of the action but also from the observation of the same action by others. Though the mirror neuron system provides a basis for overlap between perceived and executed motor events, some investigators have suggested that an extra cognitive analysis should mediate to fulfill imitation. Several analyses of intelligent errors of imitation by children demonstrated that for a complex imitation task, children must reconstruct a goal by decomposing a perceived event into different aspects (e.g., Bekkering, Wohlschlager, & Gattis, 2000; Meltzoff & Moore, 1997). Preschool children were reported to make more contralateral than ipsilateral errors (e.g., touching the left ear with the right hand more than with the left hand) when duplicating anothers action (Bekkering et al., 2000). Contralateral errors were reduced when bimanual gestures were required (e.g., touching both ears using both hands by crossing the midline). This result suggests that the children coded the end point as the goal of the imitation, and thus their task description was touch the left ear. The goal-directed coding strategy would yield contralateral errors more frequently. In Experiment 2, Bekkering et al. reduced the competing goals for contralateral duplication by requiring children to touch only the ear on one side with either the left or right hand to duplicate the action. This method significantly reduced the contralateral errors. Bekkering et al. posited that children decompose a task into subgoals such as an object, an agent, and a movement path. One dominant goal over other goals would capture the imitative action. This goal hierarchy guides the mediation between perception and action. From an evolutionary view, this error is often called an intelligent error, since flexible imitation brings about more critical learning than does copying anothers action exactly. Thus, one does not copy others actions physically but imitates their goals by parsing the events.

Modulation of Perception by Action


The ideomotor principle has given more attention to the phenomena for influence of perception on concurrent action planning or execution. Borrowing Prinzs (1997) term, most researchers of ideomotor theory have sought to discover the traces of perception in action (p. 133). If the ideomotor principle assumes common representation of action and perception as well as a bidirectional influence between them, the model should also take into account how the properties of action impact perception. Several investigators recently have attempted to show this opposite direction of influence, that is, how planning and execution of action influences perceptual encoding (e.g., Witt, Proffitt, & Epstein, 2005). This phenomenon is sometimes called perceptual resonance (Schutz Bosbach & Prinz, 2007). Some researchers inspired by the ecological approach have offered a number of reports about impacts of action on perception (e.g., Witt et al., 2005). Concurrent or preplanned action influences perceptual sensitivity, either increasing or decreasing it, or perceptual bias, through either overestimation or underestimation.

Contrast
Perceptual contrast refers to disruption of the perceptual process, or perceptual bias in a direction opposite to that of the

planned or concurrent action. Musseler and Hommel (1997a; 1997b) found an inverted SRC effect, for which stimulus identification was disrupted more when a to-be-executed response was compatible with a masked visual arrow than when it was incompatible. They called this temporary insensitivity to the stimulus action-induced blindness. In their task, a participant was to perform a sequence of keypresses for two arrows (S1 and S2) presented across time. The unmasked S1 was a precue that did not require an immediate response. Participants were then to make an obligatory double keypress (R0) after a fixed delay from S1, and this R0 triggered the presentation of S2, which was provided for individually customized durations ranging from 14 ms to 70 ms before being masked. A compatible left or right keypress (R1) to S1 was to be made as quickly as possible after S2 appeared. An unspeeded judgment (R2) of arrow direction for S2 (the masked stimulus) was to be completed after a delay of at least 1 s from completion of R1. Participants were less accurate at identifying the direction of S2 when R1 corresponded to S2 than when it did not. Furthermore, the interval between R0 and R1 was longer when the masked S2 was compatible to R1. Musseler and Hommel explained these somewhat counterintuitive results by the common coding assumption: Participants became momentarily less sensitive to a particular stimulus that shared features with the action. Blindness to response-compatible stimuli has also been observed in other studies with a similar sequential keypress procedure (see Kunde & Wuhr, 2004; Wuhr & Musseler, 2002). In line with this approach, Schubo, Prinz, and Aschersleben (2004) found that ongoing movement execution affected a simultaneous perceivable event. Participants performed a sinusoidal drawing task while observing sinusoidal movement of a dot along an invisible trajectory for 2 s. Participants copied the motion and shape of the preceding trials stimulus and were to memorize the current stimuluss motion and shape for the next trials drawing, which was termed a serial overlapping response task. A new trial was initiated after an intertrial interval (ITI) of 2 8 s. Amplitude and velocity of the drawings were measured. The drawing movement was slower and smaller when large and fast stimulus motion was presented concurrently, and vice versa. Hence, reverse SRC effects were discovered when a stimulus and response for one trial were temporally separated. Schub et al. concluded that it becomes progressively more difficult to distinguish two functionally unrelated events as more features are shared between the current movement and the perceivable event. This contrast pattern was preserved when a trajectory of traveling dots was kept visible on the display. Schub et al. argued that an action code shares many features with the stimulus code, and a conscious endeavor is required to inhibit automatic activation of the action code that occurs as a consequence of perceiving the current stimulus. They also found that the contrast effect was pronounced only for the shortest ITI (2 s) and disappeared after a few seconds. For the longest ITI (8 s), it was replaced by an assimilation pattern. Contrast also refers to perceptual bias that is distorted in an opposite manner of the concurrent action planning. Viswanathan, Tobin, Fowler, and Magnuson (2008) observed that participants less often categorized a certain sound as /ba/ when they were to make a silent kiss-like gesture similar to the lip movements to pronounce the /ba/ sound. This contrast effect was observed when the silent lip gesture preceded the sound presentation by 500 ms and disappeared when participants were required to make the

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gesture at the same time as the sound. Hamilton, Wolpert, and Frith (2004) required participants to lift a box of various weights while observing a movie of another person lifting a box. Participants overestimated the weight of the box lifted by the actor when the box that they lifted concurrently was relatively light and underestimated it when the box they lifted was heavy.

Assimilation
Perceptual assimilation refers to enhancement of detection or identification of the stimulus, or perceptual bias in the same direction as the action. Craighero, Fadiga, Rizzolatti, and Umilta ` (1999) found that preparation for grasping an object facilitated detection or discrimination of the change of the object alignment when the features of the to-be-performed action and the target object matched. This effect disappeared in the case in which identity or orientation of the visual objects was matched, but the motor affordance (e.g., keypresses) did not correspond to the object. Ishimura and Shimojo (1994) discovered that participants were more likely to judge the direction of ambiguous apparent motion as being the same as that of a concurrent hand movement, an effect that they termed action capture. Wohlschlager (2000) extended this effect by varying the degree of correspondence between the apparent motion and the hand movement. He used circular flickering dots for the perceived motion stimulus. The motion direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) was judged by a left-hand keypress made concurrently with movements of the right hand. An arrow in the center of the circular dots cued the direction of the required hand movements. Participants varied the right-hand movements by rotating a knob (clockwise/counterclockwise for Experiment 1) or pressing a key (right/left for Experiment 2 and up/down for Experiment 3). Wohlschlager found the assimilative bias of perception for these three tasks and for a planned action task (Experiment 4). Witt et al. (2005) showed that participants estimated the distance to a target to be less when they reached for the target with a baton than when they reached without one.

The Mechanisms Underlying Contrast and Assimilation


It has usually been argued that phenomena of assimilation and contrast result from common cognitive codes. One of the accounts focuses on the temporary limitation of the attentional resource to process the same features for two different functions. According to Schutz-Bosbach and Prinz (2007),
[Because] action and perception-related processes draw on identical cognitive codes . . ., those codes that are currently in use for specifying a response are less available for perception. Increasing the time interval between action production and perceptual encoding might dissolve this competition of action and perception-related codes. (p. 351)

action must be performed that shares the same property of the perceived scene simultaneously with the scene being encoded. Participants may have to suppress involuntary activation from the stimulus to perform an earlier planned action successfully at the same time. This conflict will be more severe when the interval between the two events is short. In several experiments (e.g., Schutz-Bosbach & Prinz, 2007), increasing the interval between the tasks has been shown to solve the conflicts of attending to the common feature and produce assimilation. When the tasks for action and perception do not require attending to the same stimulus feature, the assimilative enhancement has often been obtained. For instance, Craighero et al. (1999) asked participants to hold the instrument (action) while performing a detection task (perception). The action task did not require extracting a perceptual feature from the stimulus to be detected, which means that perceptual conflicts from the dual-task setting would not be involved in this action task. Thus, assimilation or contrast may depend on whether the perceptual feature to be processed is relevant or irrelevant to the current action planning. Some researchers have proposed a similar hypothesis based on TEC. They suggested that contrast occurs when two or more features in the environment need to be integrated. But when the feature to be perceived is not relevant to the required action, as in a Simon task, the feature does not need to be integrated, and assimilation occurs (Hommel & Musseler, 2006; Musseler & Hommel, 1997a, 1997b). Contrast and assimilation phenomena also include perceptual bias, which can be in the same or opposite direction as the concurrent action. The boundary condition to decide the direction of the bias is whether the perceptual judgment is relevant to the concurrent action in terms of the actionability or intention. For instance, Witt et al. (2005) asked participants to give an oral estimate of the distance from a wood handle to the target in inches. Assimilation was observed when they were required to hold the handle, with distance underestimated. According to Witt et al., the environment is perceived in terms of ability to act out. They posited that use of a hand tool changes the perception of the immediate space, since the object seems to be more reachable or graspable with the tool. In contrast to assimilative bias, a contrastive effect was often observed when perceivers were required to judge another persons action (Hamilton et al., 2004), which was likely to be unrelated to the actors intention to act out. Influence from perception to action seems rather consistent, typically producing assimilation; however, the perceptual modulation while acting produces various types of illusion or sensitivity.

Discussion Ideomotor Theory: Strong or Weak?


Our aim in this review was to provide ample evidence of perceptionaction coupling phenomena under the name of ideomotor phenomena and to organize those cases according to their methodologies and the category to which they refer. We have presented evidence from several lines of research, which are organized, along with major findings, in Table 1. The interaction between action and perception is not a surprising new discovery. Incorporating an anticipatory mechanism between two contingent events and, later, priming one event by presenting the other is not a unique feature of the ideomotor account either. It

It is noteworthy that the attentional limitation in processing common features has been observed often in dual-task situations (e.g., Schubo et al., 2004). Though the two tasks were described separately, such as action and perceptual judgment, the tasks were essentially the same in that participants had to attend to the same spatial feature of the stimulus to select responses for each task. An

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Table 1 Findings of Ideomotor Studies Organized by Direction of Modulation, Activation Type, and Task Type
Direction/activation type/task type Modulation of action by perception Endogenous activation of anticipatory image (effect event) Serial reaction-time task When the effect event is the stimulus to which to respond (task relevant) When the effect event is redundant Finding

The responsestimulus association is a critical component of serial learning (Ziessler, 1998). Performance is better in response to the contingent tone effects than to random effects (Drost et al., 2005; Hoffmann et al., 2001), most interrupted when the tone effects are altered by serial shift (Pfordresher, 2005), and improved when the effect tones are compatibly assigned to the key locations (Hoffmann et al., 2001). When the tone (paired with the response in the association phase) is presented with the stimulus in the test phase, performance is better (Hommel, 1996). Action can be redefined with newly associated effect features (Beckers et al., 2002). When there is compatible relation between action and its effect, the performance is better than the incompatible relation (Kunde, 2001b). Presentation of a stimulus that resembles the following actions sensory consequence can activate the action itself (Greenwald, 1972). Observing biological motion can evoke a corresponding body-related gesture (Brass et al., 2000; Sturmer et al., 2000) but not always (Ottoboni et al., 2005). An act to try to change the direction of a ball desirably occurred in the billiard-like task even after the effective control action was completed for the hand effector (Knuf et al., 2001). Perceptual ideomotor action was weakly found for the foot and the head effectors, and it was guided by the most dynamic moving scene (Knuf et al., 2001). Disruption of the perceptual process, or perceptual bias in a direction opposite to that of planned or concurrent action (Musseler & Hommel, 1997a, 1997b). Enhancement of detection or identification of the stimulus, or perceptual bias in the same direction as the action (Craighero et al., 1999).

Choice reaction-time task Two-stage learning

Responseeffect compatibility Exogenous activation by stimulus event Ideomotor compatibility Biological motion Ideomotor action Intentional ideomotor action Perceptually induced ideomotor action Modulation of perception by action Contrast Assimilation

has been assumed to be an essential intelligent component of adaptive behavior in cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, animal learning, and artificial intelligence (Blank, Lewis, & Marshall, 2005; Butz, Sigaud, & Gerard, 2003; Kunde, 2001b; Rosen, 1985; Schubotz & von Cramon, 2001). In the cited articles, the mental representation of the intended action effects is the cause of the action. However, in ideomotor theory, this phenomenon is viewed in a more radical manner than in conventional approaches; for instance, ideomotor theory suggests a common domain for action and perception in general or action potential preserved in perception. We define a strong ideomotor theory as one that describes the perceptionaction interface as one that does not require any intermediate steps for translation between the two domains. Most ideomotor theories are strong ones, although they may suggest different levels of strength in specific subhypotheses. A strong hypothesis can be divided into whether it is a general framework (Category 1), such as TEC, or a more limited account for a specific domain, such as imitation (Category 2). A weak hypothesis suggests that an action should be mediated by additional cognitive processes to construct a motor pattern corresponding to the idea (Category 3). In fact, a weak hypothesis may not be truly an ideomotor theory, but in custom, this view has been termed a weak

ideomotor hypothesis for depiction of the relation between perception and action (e.g., Jansson et al., 2007; Shin & Proctor, 2008). As noted, TEC has often been regarded as nonfalsifiable. Hommel et al. (2001) acknowledged that TEC is deliberately underspecified, indicating that TECs main mission at this point is to stimulate deliberations and discussions about basic principles of perception/action architectures (p. 914). To decide whether TEC is a strong or weak hypothesis does not seem to be simple either. If a hypothesis only accounts for the early part of action, as TEC does, it may be not eligible to be called a strong ideomotor theory. As quoted in the introduction, Hommel et al. (2001) stated that perception in their model shares several attributes with properties attributed to the ventral processing stream. If TEC is based on ventral processing, the system should transform the sensory input stored in memory to an action code in additional steps. Several ideomotor-related studies relate more directly to the dorsal processing stream, which specifies an action by discovering action potentiation from the perceived events (e.g., Brass et al., 2000). Ideomotor theory should take into account late action (execution of action) by an idea; in other words, it should be strong, in which case it may acquire unique status for depiction of the relation of action and perception. Otherwise, it is difficult to dissociate the ideomotor hypothesis from other competing cogni-

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tive models. For instance, Kornblums (1992) dimensional overlap model also suggests a common representation in a higher mental architecture, where perception and action features overlap to refer the same abstract property such as left. Little empirical evidence has been found that would dissociate the dimensional overlap model and common coding theory experimentally with respect to SRC effects. Though Prinz (1997) introduced the orthogonal SRC effect (up/right down/left mapping advantage; Weeks & Proctor, 1990) as evidence against the dimensional overlap model, that effect does not seem to favor the common coding theory. Rather, the orthogonal SRC effect has been explained by dimensional overlap of asymmetric structural features, which can be called polarity correspondence (for review, see Cho & Proctor, 2003). Thus, when an ideomotor-related model confines its explanatory level to the highly cognitive area of early action, its acceptance should depend on demonstration that it can be separated from other cognitive models in which perception and action codes are assumed to overlap in some manner. Kunde (2001a) also suggested that more specification of late action is necessary for a comprehensive theory about how abstract action codes can select one particular candidate from among an infinite number to achieve a desired state. Some ideomotor accounts focus on a specific domain for perception and action such as biological motion or imitation (Category 2) and have been supported by numerous neurophysiological findings. These studies can be divided into those that focus on amodal representation of action and perception, such as mirror neuron accounts, or modal representation of perception onto motor neural correlates, such as Jeannerods (2001) account. Observing or imaging of action was reported to provoke the same neural substrates and the same brain areas such as primary motor cortex except for a kinesthetic component (Abbruzzese, Trompetto, & Schieppati, 1996). Jeannerod proposed that cortical motor areas are primarily involved in mental imagery and also in observation, planning, and verbalization of actions. He suggested that this activity in the motor cortex can be interpreted as a covert stage (e.g., preparation) of action. Idea about action can activate the neural correlates corresponding to the motor command but inhibits the outflow signals at some point so that no overt behavior occurs. Otherwise, the idea may activate the descending motor pathways at subthreshold level (e.g., Hanakawa, Dimyan, & Hallett, 2008). If the inhibition fails or if the idea activates the motor component above the threshold level, it will produce involuntary action. Fadiga, Fogassi, Pavesi, and Rizzolatti (1995) even discovered a significant increase of motor-evoked potentials in the peripheral motor system, such as in hand muscles, when biological motion is observed. The findings of these modal representation studies correspond to the original ideomotor concept from James (1890/ 1950). Although the scientific tools to measure brain activity were not well developed in 1890, James implied that the representation of an idea activates the neural substrates corresponding to motor control. According to him, ideomotor phenomena are those of seamless operation from idea to action only if one observes, imagines, or represents the action. A mirror neuron account can be applied to Category 2, but it does not suggest that all necessary parameters for the imitative performance be specified from observation. Instead, mirror neurons seem primarily involved in action semantics, which are related to understanding the intention or goal of an action and early

action planning rather than late planning of construction of the kinematic detail of the action. If area F5 is involved in imitative behavior, the involvement is in the observers imitation of the actors intention through the observers own interpretation rather than exactly copying the actors movement. Remember the contralateral imitative error for young children mentioned previously. They imitated the goal of the action touch the left ear by improvising the movement in their own manner. Children ignored other details and focused only on the end state of action. The flexibility of area F5s interpretation of action is evolutionarily more beneficial (that is why the childrens error is often called an intelligent error), since it allows genuine communication with others. Area F5 is highly overlapped with Brocas area and is known to discharge to observations of movements related to the hand and mouth. MacNeilage (1992) suggested that the evolutionary origin of speech can be traced back to the use of hand gestures. Thus, matching of the observed and executed gestures is the precursor of the speech communication with others. Area F5 is also called a mind-reading cell for this reason (e.g., Iacoboni, 2008). However, for this characteristic of the mirror neurons, Vogt (2002) pointed out that motor representations in area F5 are still too abstract for the relevant degrees of freedom corresponding to a motor command to be specified. This indication is analogous to TECs dilemma, which set a description boundary to the early action. If one tags a neural correlate of TEC, then area F5 is the most appropriate candidate. Therefore, the question that still remains for the mirror neuron hypothesis is whether the hypothesis is indisputably strong if only the early action is considered. Because a certain brain area could be expected to discharge to a certain meaning, for instance, an actions goal either from the action itself (planning of a goal) or action observation (understanding of action), it is predicted that this outcome occurs. Category 3 is a weak ideomotor hypothesis, which suggests that some additional cognitive steps must be filled in to achieve transformation of perception into action. That automatic activation from an idea can be incorrect provides evidence to support this hypothesis. Ideomotor compatibility effect studies in the dual-task paradigm can be assigned into this type, since they showed that the even two IM-compatible tasks disrupted performance when they had to be performed simultaneously. But Shin and Proctor (2008) noted that the operational definition of an IM-compatible task was questionable and left a further possibility that certain SR sets such as biological motion or goal-directed movement (pointing or eye saccade) may have a minimum level of cost for translating perception into action. Ideomotor apraxia can be a counterexample against the strong ideomotor account. Though the consensus definition of the term apraxia is the inability to translate the intended movement into an appropriate motor act, the precise description of the malfunction is still debated. The critical locus of apraxia has been the disrupted interaction between cognitive representation and production (e.g., Halsband, 1998). Since patients with apraxia display normal movements in many spontaneous daily works, the syndrome is often characterized as a disorder of skilled movement not caused by weakness, akinesia, deafferentation, abnormal tone or posture, and movement disorders such as tremors or chorea (Goldenberg, 1995, p. 64). Furthermore, apraxia patients conceptually understand what to do but often fail to execute their idea into motion,

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even with their intact motor ability. Most of all, they are unable to imitate meaningful (e.g., combing their hair) or meaningless (e.g., placing an index finger on their nose) gestures or movements by following anothers action (e.g., Ochipa, Rothi, & Heilman, 1989). However, skilled movements, such as connecting beads, remain relatively intact (Goldenberg, 1995). Some patients conceptually understand how to use a specific tool (know what to do) but cannot execute the action for using the tool appropriately (do not know how to do). These findings concerning ideomotor apraxia imply that a certain extra bridge is required to be intact to translate idea to action. If a strong ideomotor theory is true, when one knows what to do with intact motor skill, planning of action should be converted into action seamlessly. For all conflicting sensorimotor coupling hypotheses, the problem often comes from the different levels of description of action and perception that are subserved by functionally distinct neural subsystems, as Norman (2002) stated. Notably, a substantial amount of evidence has suggested that the vision system consists of two functionally different visual pathways (Milner & Goodale, 1995), the ventral and dorsal streams described earlier. Some ideomotor researchers have defined clearly what they are referring to as perception in terms of the ventral dorsal division. Buxbaum et al. (2005) proposed that ideomotor apraxia is attributable to damage in the inferior parietal lobe, which is closely related to the ventral system. To achieve successful duplication of anothers action, one must bring about stored information about the others action and recalculate the action parameter to produce the action through ones own spatial body features. In contrast, the relevant information for an object-directed movement is delivered online, and the action upon object is unfolded on the same referential frame for action and perception. The dorsalventral division was supported by double dissociation evidence. Perenin and Vighetto (1988) found that patients with optic ataxia showed deficient ability to reach to a target but were frequently unimpaired in imitation behavior. Some have suggested that the dorsal system may serve the transformation of perception to action when the stimulus is highly congruent to the action feature (Keller et al., 2006; Waszak et al., 2005). When the perceptionaction mapping is arbitrary, it requires representation at a higher cognitive level by cross-domain mapping, thought to be achieved by the ventral system (Passingham, Toni, & Rushworth, 2000; Wise, di Pellegrino, & Boussaoud, 1996), which also corresponds to TECs descriptive level. In further studies, researchers should elaborate upon how the dorsalventral division coexists with ideomotor theory by specifying their definitions more clearly.

action is triggered automatically by anticipation of the sensory feedback in more elaborated scientific terms than those accounts from the 19th century. The anticipatory process to produce an action was incorporated into TEC, which was formulated on the basis of various accounts about the close relation between action and perception. TEC focuses on the incommensurability between action and perception in terms of their contents and suggests a common representational domain for perception and action, especially, with the cognitive antecedent of the action. The direct linkage between perception and action has received much support from discoveries in cognitive neuroscience. The ideomotor theory continues to encourage research on hypotheses concerning coding of the action effects, a topic that previously had been somewhat neglected in human behavioral models.

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Concluding Remarks
Ideomotor theory was initiated from the question of how an idea produces its intended action. The modern version of an answer to William Jamess search for how an action is initiated by an idea was suggested by the ideomotor principle (Greenwald, 1970) and extended in the integrated account of TEC (Hommel et al., 2001). This ideomotor theory has now burgeoned into a framework that has instigated much research about action and perception, primarily fueled by a variety of sensorimotor coupling findings from neuroscience. The ideomotor theory, dormant since early in the 20th century, was rediscovered by Greenwald (1970). He suggested that an

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Received April 9, 2009 Revision received May 4, 2010 Accepted May 17, 2010

Correction to Shin et al. (2010)


In the Online First Publication of the article A Review of Contemporary Ideomotor Theory by Yun Kyoung Shin, Robert W. Proctor, and E. J. Capaldi (Psychological Bulletin, posted September 6, 2010, doi: 10.1037/a0020541), the title of the article was incorrectly listed as A Review of Contemporary Idiomatic Theory. All versions of this article have been corrected.
DOI: 10.1037/a0021628

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