Action planning can be construed as the temporary binding of features of perceptual action effects. While previous research demonstrated binding for task-relevant, body-related effect features, the role of task-irrelevant or environment-related effect features in action planning is less clear. Here, we studied whether task-relevance or body-relatedness determines feature binding in action planning. Participants planned an action A, but before executing it initiated an intermediate action B. Each action relied on a body-related effect feature (index vs. middle finger movement) and an environment-related effect feature (cursor movement towards vs. away from a reference object). In Experiments 1 and 2, both effects were task-relevant. Performance in action B suffered from partial feature overlap with action A compared to full feature repetition or alternation, which is in line with binding of both features while planning action A. Importantly, this cost disappeared when all features were available but only body-related features were task-relevant (Experiment 3). When only the environment-related effect of action A was known in advance, action B benefitted when it aimed at the same (vs. a different) environment-related effect (Experiment 4). Consequently, the present results support the idea that task relevance determines whether binding of body-related and environment-related effect features takes place while the pre-activation of environment-related features without binding them primes feature-overlapping actions.

行动计划可以被解释为感知行动效果特征的临时结合。虽然之前的研究证明了与任务相关、与身体相关的效果特征的结合，但与任务无关或与环境相关的效果特征在行动计划中的作用还不太清楚。在这里，我们研究了任务相关性或身体相关性是否决定了行动规划中的特征绑定。参与者计划了一个动作 A，但在执行之前启动了一个中间动作 B。每个动作都依赖于与身体相关的效果特征（食指与中指的移动）和与环境相关的效果特征（光标朝向或远离目标的移动）。参考对象）。在实验 1 和 2 中，两种效果都与任务相关。与完整的特征重复或交替相比，动作 B 的性能与动作 A 的部分特征重叠，这与规划动作 A 时两个特征的绑定一致。重要的是，当所有特征都可用但只有与身体相关的特征可用时，这种成本就消失了与任务相关（实验 3）。当仅预先知道行动 A 的环境相关影响时，行动 B 在针对相同（相对于不同）环境相关影响时受益（实验 4）。因此，目前的结果支持这样的观点：任务相关性决定是否发生身体相关和环境相关效果特征的绑定，而环境相关特征的预激活而不绑定它们会引发特征重叠动作。