Prioritization in the coordination of multiple action modalities

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This project mainly aims at a better understanding of prioritization mechanisms involved in the coordination of actions involving different effector systems. While many studies of the cognitive underpinnings of action control usually restrict their analyses to only a single effector system (e.g., latency/errors of manual key press responses), our daily behavior typically involves the control of many effector systems (e.g., hand, foot, eye, vocal tract) simultaneously. For example, writing the present proposal involves the simultaneous execution of manual key presses and eye movements. However, up to now there is only sparse research on the issue of how we can prioritize specific effector systems in situations involving simultaneous co-ordination of multiple actions. While there is a substantial body of research on the prioritization of input modalities (research on cross-modal attention), there is no comparable tradition on the output (action) side of processing (cross-modal action control). The present proposal is intended to address this surprising and substantial research gap in the field of action/behavior control. In this context, the present experiments are also designed to focus on response modalities that have previously been largely neglected in the (closely related) field of multi-tasking (e.g., eye movements, foot responses). The results will help to further specify existing theoretical frameworks on multiple action control.