Moving to directly cued locations abolishes spatial interference during bimanual actions

Abstract—Interference is frequently observed during bimanual move-ments if the two hands perform nonsymmetric actions. We examined the source of bimanual interference in two experiments in which we compared conditions involving symmetric movements with conditions in which the movements were of different amplitudes or different direc-tions. The target movements were cued either symbolically by letters or directly by the onset of the target locations. With symbolic cues, re-action times were longer when the movements of the two hands were not symmetric. With direct cues, reaction times were the same for sym-metric and nonsymmetric movements. These results indicate that di-rectly cued actions can be programmed in parallel for the two hands. Our results challenge the hypothesis that the cost to initiate nonsym-metric movements is due to spatial interference in a motor-program-ming stage. Rather, the cost appears to be caused by stimulus identification, response-selection processes connected to the process