Instructed prevention actions reveal the associative nature of propositional response-effect contingency knowledge

Because prevention actions result in the non-occurrence of certain events, it is rather unclear how action-event linkages can emerge for these action types. Here, we investigated whether verbal instructions alone can establish such linkages and how they influence behavior. Therefore, participants had to memorize propositional knowledge about prevention actions, and we tested how actions in a subsequent, unrelated task were impacted by this knowledge. Our results demonstrate that actions were facilitated by the very event they are known to prevent, not by the absence of this event. Thus, these action-event linkages were both (a) 'propositional', as they were established by verbal instructions alone, and also (b) 'associative', as they impacted behavior akin to unqualified, bidirectional associations.