Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34787077›Full record

ArticleeLife2021

Urgency forces stimulus-driven action by overcoming cognitive control.

Christian H Poth

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in eLife, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
18citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Article
  3. Contributions of Distinct Attention Mechanisms to Saccadic Choices in a Gamified, Dynamic Environment.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026
    Article
  4. Phasic Alertness Impairs Cognitive Control by Amplifying Competition between Evidence Accumulators.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025
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  10. Review
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  12. Article
  13. Coupling of saccade plans to endogenous attention during urgent choices.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024
    Article
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

1 author.

Christian H PothNeuro-Cognitive Psychology, Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.ORCID 0000-0003-1621-4911

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Intelligent behavior requires to act directed by goals despite competing action tendencies triggered by stimuli in the environment. For eye movements, it has recently been discovered that this ability is briefly reduced in urgent situations (Salinas et al., 2019). In a time-window before an urgent response, participants could not help but look at a suddenly appearing visual stimulus, even though their goal was to look away from it. Urgency seemed to provoke a new visual-oculomotor phenomenon: A period in which saccadic eye movements are dominated by external stimuli, and uncontrollable by current goals. This period was assumed to arise from brain mechanisms controlling eye movements and spatial attention, such as those of the frontal eye field. Here, we show that the phenomenon is more general than previously thought. We found that also in well-investigated manual tasks, urgency made goal-conflicting stimulus features dominate behavioral responses. This dominance of behavior followed established trial-to-trial signatures of cognitive control mechanisms that replicate across a variety of tasks. Thus together, these findings reveal that urgency temporarily forces stimulus-driven action by overcoming cognitive control in general, not only at brain mechanisms controlling eye movements.

Indexed as

Executive FunctionSaccadesAdultAttentionCognitionEye-Tracking TechnologyHumansTask Performance and Analysisattentioncognitive controlexecutive functioneye movementsfrontal cortexhumanneuroscience

Identifiers

PMID34787077
PMCPMC8598232

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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.