Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theories of event-predictive, anticipatory behavior controlsuggest that complex action planning and control is segmentedinto sequences of anticipated subgoals and according behav-ioral events, which accomplish the subgoals. Here we focus onthe cognitive dynamics during successive subgoal activations.We combined a virtual object interaction task (prehension andtransport of a bottle) with a crossmodal congruency task. An-ticipatory crossmodal congruency effects (aCCEs) occur at thegoal of the current behavior, before the goal is reached. TheseaCCEs appear to be stronger during prehension, while visualdistractors at the currently irrelevant movement target have noeffect. While the results so far provide only partial supportfor the proposed anticipatory, sequential control process, theparadigm is well-suited to probe the dynamic changes of spa-tial body representations in object interactions.