Abstract
Rapidly integrating information in our environment for response planning is critical for accurate actions. Predictive cues and attention orienting help us to predict and plan an action relative to what may come next. It is unclear how cues with no spatial information to orient the actor to the upcoming action affect action planning. The purpose of the current study was to determine whether participants subconsciously pre-plan an action following non-spatial, symbolic, predictive cues. High and low predictive cues preceded target appearance. It was hypothesized that as participants subconsciously became aware of the predictability of the cues, that when the target appeared on the non-predicted side, the trajectory of their movements would reflect a pre-planned response associated with that cue; i.e., deviate towards the predictive side before correcting their movement to bring their hand towards the target. No such deviation was expected for the low predictive cue. Results contradicted the hypothesis, demonstrating that participants actually deviated away from the predicted side following the predictive cue. These results indicate that learned, non-spatial symbolic cues may produce inhibition of return type behaviour.
