Episodic Binding and Retrieval in Sequences of Discrete Movements – Evidence from Grasping Actions

In everyday life humans are confronted with changing environmental demands. In order to act successfully and achieve intended goals, action control is required. A recent approach, the Binding and Retrieval in Action Control (BRAC) framework, attempts to provide an overarching perspective on action control. Based on basic principles such as binding and retrieval, findings from several experimental paradigms could be integrated. However, the focus so far has been on rather artificial paradigms involving very simple motor response requirements, like finger lifting or button presses. We aimed to extend the BRAC framework to more complex movements consisting of a sequence of several discrete actions. Participants were asked to grasp and lift an object with an uneven mass distribution. Object features, like mass distribution and position, were either kept constant on a global level or varied in a pseudorandomized manner. When both object features were kept constant, participants were able to adjust their grasp so that it resulted in a more stable lift and less object roll. Further, with randomly mixed object features, we found best task performance when both object features were completely repeated from one trial to the other. These results suggest that tasks with more complex movements are capable of reflecting principles of action control as defined by the BRAC framework. This offers the possibility to test these principles in even more complex and ecologically relevant paradigms to improve our understanding of everyday life actions.