What happens between an external stimulus and an overt response?
Peripheral components of feedthrough loops were psychophysiologically measured from the brain, both forelimbs, the tongue and the eyes during simple and choice reaction time tasks using linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. Closing a microswitch with the little finger was the overt response. Covert electromyographic (EMG) responses were computer identified in the following average temporal order: generally, the earliest covert reactions were in the tongue, brain, eyes, and passive arm-hand region. Next were complex EMG events in the active limb. These covert reactions may function in feedthrough loops to generate and transmit codes during internal information processing. The passive arm-hand responses occurred significantly earlier than the onset of the covert EMG burst for closing the microswitch; perhaps there is an inhibitory response “commanding” the passive arm not to respond, before the other (active) limb can overtly respond. Mean response patterns to linguistic and non-linguis