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Motor Demands Constrain Cognitive Rule Structures
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...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4788431/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26966909 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004785 |
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author | Collins, Anne Gabrielle Eva Frank, Michael Joshua |
author_facet | Collins, Anne Gabrielle Eva Frank, Michael Joshua |
author_sort | Collins, Anne Gabrielle Eva |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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 hypothesized that the specific structure subjects adopt would be constrained by the motor patterns afforded within each rule. Across four independent data-sets, we show that subjects create rule structures that afford motor clustering, preferring structures in which adjacent motor actions are valid within each task-set. In a fifth data-set using instructed rules, this bias was strong enough to counteract the well-known task switch-cost when instructions were incongruent with motor clustering. Computational simulations confirm that observed biases can be explained by leveraging overlap in cortical motor representations to improve outcome prediction and hence infer the structure to be learned. These results highlight the importance of sensorimotor constraints in abstract rule formation and shed light on why humans have strong biases to invent structure even when it does not exist. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4788431 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-47884312016-03-23 Motor Demands Constrain Cognitive Rule Structures Collins, Anne Gabrielle Eva Frank, Michael Joshua PLoS Comput Biol Research Article 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 hypothesized that the specific structure subjects adopt would be constrained by the motor patterns afforded within each rule. Across four independent data-sets, we show that subjects create rule structures that afford motor clustering, preferring structures in which adjacent motor actions are valid within each task-set. In a fifth data-set using instructed rules, this bias was strong enough to counteract the well-known task switch-cost when instructions were incongruent with motor clustering. Computational simulations confirm that observed biases can be explained by leveraging overlap in cortical motor representations to improve outcome prediction and hence infer the structure to be learned. These results highlight the importance of sensorimotor constraints in abstract rule formation and shed light on why humans have strong biases to invent structure even when it does not exist. Public Library of Science 2016-03-11 /pmc/articles/PMC4788431/ /pubmed/26966909 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004785 Text en © 2016 Collins, Frank http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Collins, Anne Gabrielle Eva Frank, Michael Joshua Motor Demands Constrain Cognitive Rule Structures |
title | Motor Demands Constrain Cognitive Rule Structures |
title_full | Motor Demands Constrain Cognitive Rule Structures |
title_fullStr | Motor Demands Constrain Cognitive Rule Structures |
title_full_unstemmed | Motor Demands Constrain Cognitive Rule Structures |
title_short | Motor Demands Constrain Cognitive Rule Structures |
title_sort | motor demands constrain cognitive rule structures |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4788431/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26966909 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004785 |
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