The Prospective Nature of Voluntary Action: Insights from the Reflexive Imagery Task

Abstract

Voluntary action is peculiar in several ways. For example, it is highly prospective in nature, requiring the activation of the representations of anticipated action-effects (e.g., a button pressed). These prospective action-effects can represent outcomes in the short-term (e.g., fingers snapping or uttering “cheers”) or in the long-term (e.g., building a house). In this review about the prospective nature of voluntary action, we first discuss in brief ideomotor theory, a theoretical approach that illuminates both the nature of the prospective representations in voluntary action and how these representations are acquired and subsequently used in the control of behavior. In this framework, prospective action-effects could be construed as ‘action options’ that, residing in consciousness, may or may not influence upcoming behavior, depending on the nature of the other prospective action-effects that happen to be coactivated at that time. In ideomotor theory, there is no homunculus that selects one prospective action-effect over another. Many of these prospective action-effects enter consciousness automatically. Second, we introduce the principle of atemporality and discuss the prospective nature of determining tendencies and mental simulation, all in the context of new findings from the Reflexive Imagery Task (RIT). The RIT reveals that, as a function of external control, prospective action-effects can enter consciousness in a reflex-like, automatic, and insuppressible manner. The RIT and its associated theoretical framework shed light on why the activation of such representations, though often undesired, is nonetheless adaptive and why not all of these prospective representations lead to overt action.

EEG Correlates of Involuntary Cognitions in the Reflexive Imagery Task

“…The RIT (see review in Bhangal et al, 2016b) focuses on the factors influencing stimulus-elicited involuntary entry, a form of entry that can be time-locked to a stimulus and is experimentally tractable. Stimulus-elicited involuntary entry can be of urges (Morsella et al, 2009a(Morsella et al, , 2016, percepts (Allen et al, 2016), or even high-level cognitions (Cho et al, 2016).…”

“…Last, it is worth adding that, in all theoretical accounts of involuntary cognitions (including the model of ironic processing by Wegner, 1994; see Footnote 4), it is proposed that the effect "just happens" and is not an artifact of intentional, high-level strategic processes. For example, in one account (Ach, 1905(Ach, /1951Bhangal et al, 2016b), merely hearing the word "add" in the instruction "Do not add the following numbers" incidentally increases the activation level of the set to add, which thereby yields "four" in response to the stimuli 2 and 2. The set to subtract, which would have yielded "zero" in response to the same stimuli, did not receive such activation.…”

Involuntary Entry Into Consciousness From the Activation of Sets: Object Counting and Color Naming

“…The RIT (see review in Bhangal et al, 2016b ) is based on a rich research tradition, stemming from the experimental approaches of Ach (1905/1951) , Stroop (1935) , Uznadze (1966) , Wegner (1989) , and Gollwitzer (1999) . The paradigm was developed to investigate experimentally the involuntary entry of high-level conscious contents.…”

“… Wegner (1994) proposes that ironic effects 3 arise from an interaction between two distinct processes [see discussion of relationship between Wegner’s (1994) model and the RIT in Bhangal et al, 2016b ]. One process is an operating process, which is associated with the conscious intention to maintain a particular mental state.…”

Can skeletomotor action integration occur without consciousness? Evidence from unconscious action inhibition

“…In many cases, high-level contents (e.g., subvocalizations) "just happen," as do low-level contents (e.g., nausea; see Porte; see also reflex-like activations of high-level contents in Haidt [2001] and Tetlock [2002]). To investigate how such high-level contents can arise in consciousness unintentionally and in a reflex-like manner, we developed the reflexive imagery task (RIT; Allen et al 2013; see review in Bhangal et al 2016). In this paradigm, the insuppressible conscious contents are from high-level processes, including involuntary object counting (Merrick et al 2015), subvocalizations, and even the kind of word transformations used in the childhood game of Pig Latin (Cho et al 2016).…”