More than simple associations: Event files store abstract relationships that last long enough to influence hierarchical event perception and action control.

Abstract

Identifying a stimulus feature (e.g., a musical note) via a response (e.g., pressing a piano key) leads to an event file that stores the feature-response association (often called a "binding"). Interestingly, identifying two stimulus features in rapid succession integrates the corresponding event files, thereby enabling the storage of abstract relationships between stimuli or responses in those files (e.g., the interval between two musical notes). The nature, generality, and duration of such abstract relationships, however, remain unclear. To fill these gaps, I employed prime-probe tasks wherein only retrieving one or more relationships between two stimuli or two responses from a prime trial can produce a relational sequence effect in a subsequent probe trial. Simultaneously varying perceptual and categorical relationships between two stimuli and spatial relationships between two nonhomologous finger responses on different hands (Experiment 1), only the second and third types of relationships (Experiment 2), or only the third type (Experiment 3), produced progressively smaller relational sequence effects, some of which lasted 5 s (Experiment 4). I conclude that bindings store multiple relationships, that retrieving such relationships can influence actions involving different effectors, and that such relationships are stored long enough to influence hierarchical representations of event and action sequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).