Treffer: Feature binding and error commission.

Perceptual and action representations consist of multiple independent features such as color and location of an encountered stimulus, or effector and direction of a performed action. Performing an action further establishes bindings between perceptual and action features, so that reencountering one feature retrieves all bound features. When errors are committed, both erroneous and correct responses are usually strongly represented. In Experiment 1, we investigated the binding between erroneous responses and their effects for different types of errors, with the goal of replicating and generalizing a previous single finding. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether perceptual features bind to correct or erroneous responses depending on whether they appear before or after response execution. These bindings had so far been studied separately. Participants categorized letters via key-press responses, and an irrelevant sound was played after their response (Exp. 1 and 2) or before (Exp. 2 only). Then the same or another sound was played, signaling participants to spontaneously choose a response. After an error in the letter task, participants chose the previous erroneous response more often when the sound was repeated than when it was changed. Surprisingly, neither the error type nor the timing of the sound relative to the response modulated this preference. Thus, the data unanimously support binding and retrieval between perceptual features and erroneous responses. Whether and how binding and retrieval also emerge for the nonexecuted correct response, however, seems to depend on contextual factors and might not be as ubiquitous as has been suggested before.
(© 2025. The Author(s).)

Declarations. Ethics approval: The regulations of our funding agency, the DFG, as well as regulations at our university, specify for psychological research projects that individual approval is only required for studies that entail a risk or a high level of stress for participants, for studies that provide partial information about its aims and procedures, for patient samples, for functional magnetic resonance imaging, electrical or magnetic stimulation, and for psychopharmacological studies. None of these conditions applied to our experiments, which is why we did not seek ethical approval by an institutional review board. The study was performed in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the German Psychological Society (DGPs) and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. Consent to participate: Informed consent for participation was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Consent for publication: Informed consent for publication was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Conflicts of interest: The authors have no relevant financial or nonfinancial interests to disclose. Open practices statement: For Experiment 1, the preregistration ( https://osf.io/q64dz ), which we adapted after collecting our fourth pilot sample (see section Participants for details), the data (trial-level) and the analysis code are publicly accessible at the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/6s8ey ). We preregistered to investigate two different processes, namely (1) binding and retrieval as well as (2) error cancellation in Experiment 1. Per our preregistration, we only present the results on binding and retrieval here and we will publish our results on error cancellation separately to make the two topics more accessible for readers. For Experiment 2, we also made the preregistration ( https://osf.io/u497x ), the data (trial-level) and the analysis code publicly available ( https://osf.io/r4fm7 ).