Motor Demands Constrain Cognitive Rule Structures.

ABSTRACT: Study of human executive function focuses on our ability to represent cognitive rules independently of stimulus or response modality. However, recent findings suggest that executive functions cannot be modularized separately from perceptual and motor systems, and that they instead scaffold on top of motor action selection. Here we investigate whether patterns of motor demands influence how participants choose to implement abstract rule structures. In a learning task that requires integrating two stimulus dimensions for determining appropriate responses, subjects typically structure the problem hierarchically, using one dimension to cue the task-set and the other to cue the response given the task-set. However, the choice of which dimension to use at each level can be arbitrary. We hypothes

SUBMITTER: Collins AG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4788431 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature