A gaze into the void: Anticipatory saccades toward prevented events

Abstract

It is an open question how prevented events are represented in the human cognitive system—are they represented like produced events or are they represented in a different format? Here, we propose that seemingly contradictory observations on this question can be unified by assuming different time courses for production and prevention actions. Evidence from two experiments in the anticipatory saccades paradigm supported this model. Specifically, our results suggest that prevented events might be represented like produced events during action selection and execution, whereas their representation dissolves rapidly during action monitoring. In other words, the representation of prevented events reflects a two-step process: An initial affirmative representation is followed by later negation. Preregistrations, data, and analysis scripts for all experiments are available online (https://osf.io/m3veh/).