When expectancies collide: Action dynamics reveal the interaction between stimulus plausibility and congruency.

Moreno I Coco,Nicholas D Duran

doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1033-6

Moreno I Coco, Nicholas D Duran

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1033-6

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Abstract

The cognitive architecture routinely relies on expectancy mechanisms to process the plausibility of stimuli and establish their sequential congruency. In two computer mouse-tracking experiments, we use a cross-modal verification task to uncover the interaction between plausibility and congruency by examining their temporal signatures of activation competition as expressed in a computer- mouse movement decision response. In this task, participants verified the content congruency of sentence and scene pairs that varied in plausibility. The order of presentation (sentence-scene, scene-sentence) was varied between participants to uncover any differential processing. Our results show that implausible but congruent stimuli triggered less accurate and slower responses than implausible and incongruent stimuli, and were associated with more complex angular mouse trajectories independent of the order of presentation. This study provides novel evidence of a disassociation between the temporal signatures of plausibility and congruency detection on decision responses.

Highlights

When experiencing events, our cognitive system routinely makes use of expectations to anticipate upcoming information and to guide action (e.g., Rao & Ballard, 1999; Friston, 2010; Wacongne et al, 2012)
The growing attention towards this challenge can be traced to current proposals in the cognitive sciences that aim to bridge low-level perceptual processes, highlevel expectancy mechanisms, and motor control within the same predictive processing framework (e.g., Clark, 2013; Pickering & Clark, 2014)
We examine how the response conflict develops along the decision trajectory by looking at the measures of initial degree, latency, x-flips, and area under the curve, which characterize its underlying dynamics

Summary

Introduction

Our cognitive system routinely makes use of expectations to anticipate upcoming information and to guide action (e.g., Rao & Ballard, 1999; Friston, 2010; Wacongne et al, 2012). An open challenge remains to understand how the cognitive system utilizes expectancy mechanisms to synchronously hold information across multiple points in time and integrate it to produce action responses (Bar, 2007). The growing attention towards this challenge can be traced to current proposals in the cognitive sciences that aim to bridge low-level perceptual processes, highlevel expectancy mechanisms, and motor control within the same predictive processing framework (e.g., Clark, 2013; Pickering & Clark, 2014). We draw from this framework to explore how different types of expectations interactively mediate comprehension, and how these comprehension processes can be captured over time through a fine-grained analysis of response behavior

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