During Action Selection, Consciousness Represents Selected Actions, Unselected Actions, and Involuntary Memories
By: Latoya Wright-Wilson, Fanqi Kong, and Jamie Renna
Department: Psychology
Faculty Advisors: Dr. Ezequiel Morsella and Dr. Mark Geisler
Animal research reveals that representations of unselected actions are activated during action control. For example, when a rat solves a T-maze by, say, taking the left path, there is activation of neural circuits associated with both the (correct) left path and the (incorrect) right path (Singer et al., 2013). Similarly, in humans, when one performs action X, representations of action Y may be activated. One example involves a variation of the flanker task in which subjects experienced imagery associated with the distractors. We discuss a future variant of the flanker task that could detect the neural correlates of imagery associated with the distractors. Which goal-incongruent representations are activated? In a new analysis, we combined the data from two experiments (n = 28) to reveal that there is the involuntary activation in consciousness of representations associated with undesired action sets. Subjects first learned to associate pseudowords with nonsense objects. One of the words was shown with the object in sixty trials, creating “strong associates,” while the other word was shown with the object in only ten or twenty trials, creating “weak associates.” Subjects were later presented with each object and instructed to not think of any of the associated pseudowords. The object often elicited the involuntary subvocalization of a goal-incongruent representation (consistent with Singer et al., 2013). Strong associates were more likely to enter consciousness than weak associates, F (19) = 2.51, p = .02. We discuss a future study that could assess whether stimuli can elicit also task-irrelevant autobiographical memories.