Detection versus discrimination: The limits of binding accounts in action control

Actions can be investigated by using sequential priming tasks, in which participants respond to prime and probe targets (sometimes accompanied by distractors). Facilitation and interference from prime to probe are measured by repeating, changing, or partially repeating features or responses between prime and probe. According to the action control literature, feature–feature or feature–response bindings are universal and apply for all actions. The attentional orienting literature, however, suggests that if the task is to detect stimuli, such binding effects may be absent. In two experiments, we compared performance in a discrimination task and a detection task with the exact same perceptual setup of prime–probe sequences. For the discrimination task, we replicated the typical feature–response binding pattern. Crucially, we did not observe any binding effects for the detection task, which can be explained by task-specific processes or fast response execution. These results reveal an important boundary of current binding models in action control.