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The study of action selection in humans can present challenges of task designsince our actions are usually defined by many degrees of freedom and thereforeoccupy a large action-space. While saccadic eye-movement offers a moreconstrained paradigm for investigating action selection, the study ofreach-and-grasp in upper limbs has often been defined by more complexscenarios, not easily interpretable in terms of such selection. Here we presenta novel motor behaviour task which addresses this by limiting the action spaceto a single degree of freedom in which subjects have to track (using a stylus)a vertical coloured target line displayed on a tablet computer, whilst ignoringa similarly oriented distractor line in a different colour. We ran this taskwith 55 subjects and showed that, in agreement with previous studies, thepresence of the distractor generally increases the movement latency anddirectional error rate. Further, we used two distractor conditions according towhether the distractor's location changes asynchronously or synchronously withthe location of the target. We found that the asynchronous distractor yieldedpoorer performance than its synchronous counterpart, with significantly highermovement latencies and higher error rates. We interpret these results in anaction selection framework with two actions (move left or right) and competing'action requests' offered by the target and distractor. As such, the resultsprovide insights into action selection performance in humans and supply datafor directly constraining future computational models therein.

Target-distractor Synchrony Affects Performance in a Novel Motor Task for Studying Action Selection