TY - JOUR TI - Urgency forces stimulus-driven action by overcoming cognitive control AU - Poth, Christian H A2 - Lee, Daeyeol A2 - Behrens, Timothy E A2 - Lee, Daeyeol A2 - Salinas, Emilio VL - 10 PY - 2021 DA - 2021/11/17 SP - e73682 C1 - eLife 2021;10:e73682 DO - 10.7554/eLife.73682 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.73682 AB - 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. KW - cognitive control KW - executive function KW - attention KW - frontal cortex KW - eye movements JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -