Common valence coding in action and evaluation: Affective blindness towards response-compatible stimuli

A perceptual control theory of emotional action

A theory is proposed that views emotional feelings as pivotal for action control. Feelings of emotions are valued interoceptive signals from the body that become multimodally integrated with perceptual contents from registered and mentally simulated events. During the simulation of a perceptual change from one event to the next, a conative feeling signal is created that codes for the wanting of a specific perceptual change. A wanted perceptual change is weighted more strongly than alternatives, increasing its activation level on the cognitive level and that of associated motor structures that produced this perceptual change in the past. As a consequence, a tendency for action is generated that is directed at the production of the wanted perception.

How does Go/No-Go training lead to food devaluation? Separating the effects of motor inhibition and response valence

Palatable, unhealthy food stimuli can be devalued via Go/No-Go (GNG) training that consistently pairs such stimuli with motor inhibition. However, it remains unclear whether this devaluation is caused via learned associations with motor inhibition or via inferential learning based on the valence of emitted motor responses. The present research disentangles the effects of motor assignment and response valence in GNG training through task instructions. In two studies, chocolate stimuli were consistently paired with motor inhibition ("no-go") or with motor excitation ("go"). Task instructions indicated that no-go responses were negatively valenced ("do not take") and that go responses were positively valenced ("take"), or identified no-go responses as positively valenced ("keep") and go as negatively valenced ("throw away"). The results show an effect of response valence on chocolate evaluations, but no effect of motor assignment: Chocolate stimuli were consistently devalued following pairings with a negatively valenced response, regardless of whether this response entailed motor inhibition or excitation. These findings align best with an inferential account of GNG training, suggesting that devaluation effects critically depend on inferential processes regarding motor response valence. GNG training procedures may, therefore, be optimised by disambiguating the valence of go and no-go motor responses prior to training.

Visuomotor and motorvisual priming with different types of set-level congruency: evidence in support of ideomotor theory, and the planning and control model (PCM)

Perception can prime action (visuomotor priming), and action can prime perception (motorvisual priming). According to ideomotor theory both effects rely on the overlap of mental representations between perception and action. This implies that both effects get more pronounced the more features they share. We tested this hypothesis by employing in a motorvisual (Exp. 1) and in a visuomotor (Exp. 2) setting, three different pairs of left/right target stimuli (hand pictures, arrows, and words) varying in how strongly they overlap with the pair of left/right responses. For two stimulus pairs (hands and words) the hypothesis was confirmed: hand pictures share more features with the responses than words, consequently hand pictures produced a stronger visuomotor and a stronger motorvisual priming effect than words. However, arrow stimuli showed a different pattern: the temporal dynamics of both priming effects, as well as the direction of the effect seen in motorvisual priming, were significant but opposite to that of the hand and word stimuli. This suggests that the arrows' representations were not involved in ideomotor processes, and we propose instead that they were represented in a spatial or scalar fashion, outside the representations assumed in ideomotor theory. The results are discussed in the context of ideomotor theory, and the planning and control model of motorvisual priming.

The behavioral and neural binding phenomena during visuomotor integration of angry facial expressions

Different parts of our brain code the perceptual features and actions related to an object, causing a binding problem, in which the brain has to integrate information related to an event without any interference regarding the features and actions involved in other concurrently processed events. Using a paradigm similar to Hommel, who revealed perception-action bindings, we showed that emotion could bind with motor actions when relevant, and in specific conditions, irrelevant for the task. By adapting our protocol to a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging paradigm we investigated, in the present study, the neural bases of the emotion-action binding with task-relevant angry faces. Our results showed that emotion bound with motor responses. This integration revealed increased activity in distributed brain areas involved in: (i) memory, including the hippocampi; (ii) motor actions with the precentral gyri; (iii) and emotion processing with the insula. Interestingly, increased activations in the cingulate gyri and putamen, highlighted their potential key role in the emotion-action binding, due to their involvement in emotion processing, motor actions, and memory. The present study confirmed our previous results and point out for the first time the functional brain activity related to the emotion-action association.

Audiomotor integration of angry and happy prosodies

Different parts of our brain code the perceptual features and actions related to an object, causing a binding problem: how does the brain discriminate the information of a particular event from the features of other events? Hommel (1998) suggested the event file concept: an episodic memory trace binding perceptual and motor information pertaining to an object. By adapting Hommel's paradigm to emotional faces in a previous study (Coll & Grandjean, 2016), we demonstrated that emotion could take part in an event file with motor responses. We also postulate such binding to occur with emotional prosodies, due to an equal importance of automatic reactions to such events. However, contrary to static emotional expressions, prosodies develop through time and temporal dynamics may influence the integration of these stimuli. To investigate this effect, we developed three studies with task-relevant and -irrelevant emotional prosodies. Our results showed that emotion could interact with motor responses when it was task relevant. When it was task irrelevant, this integration was also observed, but only when participants were led to focus on the details of the voices, that is, in a loudness task. No such binding was observed when participants performed a location task, in which emotion could be ignored. These results indicate that emotional binding is not restricted to visual information but is a general phenomenon allowing organisms to integrate emotion and action in an efficient and adaptive way. We discuss the influence of temporal dynamics in the emotion-action binding and the implication of Hommel's paradigm.

Watch the target! Effects in the affective misattribution procedure become weaker (but not eliminated) when participants are motivated to provide accurate responses to the target

Previous research showed that priming effects in the affective misattribution procedure (AMP) are unaffected by direct warnings to avoid an influence of the primes. The present research examined whether a priming influence is diminished by task procedures that encourage accurate judgments of the targets. Participants were motivated to categorize the affective meaning of nonsense targets accurately by being made to believe that a true word was presented in each trial and by providing feedback on (allegedly) incorrect responses. This condition produced robust priming effects. Priming was however reduced and less reliable relative to more typical AMP conditions in which participants guessed the meaning of openly presented nonsense targets. Affective judgments of nonsense targets were not affected by advance knowledge of the response mapping during the priming phase, which argues against a response-priming explanation of AMP effects. These findings show that affective primes influence evaluative judgments even in conditions in which the motivation to provide accurate responses is high and a priming of motor responses is not possible. Priming effects were however weaker with high accuracy motivation, suggesting that a focus on accurate judgments is an effective strategy to control for an unwanted priming influence in the AMP.