Masked priming of continuous movement parameters : exploring boundary conditions

Such preparation requires selection of appropriate actions and specification of how to perform them. As environmental conditions change constantly, confining preparation to one action (and one way of doing it) could be disadvantageous, and evidence does indeed suggest that multiple responses (and multiple ways of executing them) can be prepared in advance.

Competitive activation and inhibition processes determine the selection of the appropriate response, and low-level components of these processes have been studied successfully using the masked prime (MP) paradigm. In comparison, relatively little is known about the role of similar processes in determining the parameters of response execution. It is sometimes assumed, but not yet demonstrated, that parameterization processes are organized similarly to those governing response selection.