Brief Reports: Anticipating the consequences of action: An fMRI study of intention‐based task preparation |
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| Authors: | Hannes Ruge Sven C. Müller Todd S. Braver |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Neuroimaging Center, Department of Psychology, Technische Universit?t Dresden, Dresden, Germany;2. Institute of General Psychology, Biopsychology, and Methods of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Technische Universit?t Dresden, Dresden, Germany;3. Section of Developmental and Affective Neuroscience, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA;4. Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA |
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| Abstract: | A key component of task preparation may be to anticipate the consequences of task‐appropriate actions. This task switching study examined whether such type of “intentional” preparatory control relies on the presentation of explicit action effects. Preparatory BOLD activation in a condition with task‐specific motion effect feedback was compared to identical task conditions with accuracy feedback only. Switch‐related activation was found selectively in the effect feedback condition in the middle mid‐frontal gyrus and in the anterior intraparietal sulcus. Consistent with research on attentional control, the posterior superior parietal lobule exhibited switch‐related preparatory activation irrespective of feedback type. To conclude, preparatory control can occur via complementary attentional and intentional neural mechanisms depending on whether meaningful task‐specific action effects lead to the formation of explicit effect representations. |
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| Keywords: | Action selection Action effects Attention Cognitive control Task switching |
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