Planning and Representing Intentional Action

Abstract

This paper reviews recent approaches to human action planning and the cognitive representation of intentional actions. Evidence suggests that action planning takes place in terms of anticipated features of the intended goal, that is, in terms of action effects. These effects are acquired from early infancy on by registering contingencies between movements and perceptual movement outcomes. Co-occurrence of movements and effects leads to the creation of bidirectional associations between the underlying internal codes, thus establishing distributed perception-action networks subserving both perceiving external events and intentionally producing them. Action plans determine only the general, goal-relevant features of intended actions, while the fine-tuning is left to on-line sensory-motor processing. Action plans emerge from competition for action control between several factors: overlearned habits, perceptual events, and emotional influences, among others. Accordingly, action control represents a balance between personal intentions and wishes on the one hand and environmental affordances and demands on the other.

Coordinating with the Future: The Anticipatory Nature of Representation

“…This evidence supports also the ideomotor principle (James, 1890), according to which an anticipatory representation of the goal state precedes, selects and regulates the act (Hoffmann, 1993;Hommel, 2003;James, 1890): action planning takes place in terms of anticipated features of the intended goal. A crucial role of anticipation in action selection has been claimed by Greenwald (1970), too: "a current response is selected on the basis of its own anticipated sensory feedback".…”

I know how you feel: Task-irrelevant facial expressions are spontaneously processed at a semantic level

“…The fact that this effect occurred even in the absence of faces (in Block 1 of Experiment 1) suggests that the effect is not due to stimulus properties of facial expressions (e.g., anger being harder to detect) but results from the inherent, conditioned social response to detecting anger, which likely suppresses behavior in the service of gathering more information, or to avoid exacerbating the situation (e.g., Hommel, 2003;Schwarz & Clore, 1996;Winkielman et al, 2005).…”

The Representation of Time in Agency

“…Evidence from psychology and cognitive neuroscience suggests that intentional actions are implemented as part of an ongoing, more abstract, action plan (see, e.g., Hommel 2003;Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessel 2000). Action plans are formulated in terms of an intended goal or outcome state that the action will achieve.…”