Abstract
The simple actions of everyday life—flicking a light switch, suppressing the urge to say something, or grabbing a waiter's attention with a “check, please”—remain difficult to understand from a scientific point of view. Unlike the mechanisms giving rise to machine action—which are designed according to clear-cut, well principled plans—the mechanisms underlying human action are fashioned by the happenstance and tinkering process of evolution, whose products can be counterintuitive and suboptimal (Simpson, 1949; Lorenz, 1963; Gould, 1977; de Waal, 2002; Marcus, 2008), far unlike the kinds of things we humans design into robots (Arkin, 1998)1. When speaking about the reverse engineering of biological products, the roboticist thus cautions, “Biological systems bring a large amount of evolutionary baggage unnecessary to support intelligent behavior in their silicon based counterparts” (Arkin, 1998, p. 32), and, speaking of the products of mother nature, the ethologist concludes, “To the biologist who knows the ways in which selection works and who is also aware of its limitations it is no way surprising to find, in its constructions, some details which are unnecessary or even detrimental to survival” (Lorenz, 1963, p. 260). Faced with this and many other challenges (cf., Rosenbaum, 2005; Herwig et al., 2013), the student of human action is forced to abandon a normative view (which describes how things should function) of the phenomena at hand and adopt instead a more humble, descriptive view (which describes the products of nature as they have evolved to be). From such a descriptive approach, investigators over the past two decades have begun to illuminate, not only the basic processes underlying human action, but the liaison between action and consciousness—the most mysterious aspect of nervous function (Roach, 2005). In this special issue of Frontiers in Cognition, we survey these advances stemming from disparate fields of inquiry, including cognition, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence/robotics. Together, these developments unveil a great deal about the links between perception and action while also illuminating much about all else in between. Of note, these developments also reveal that the study of action production and control (“action control,” for short) provides a unique portal through which to examine the nature of conscious processing. As explained below, many aspects of consciousness are easier to study from an action-based approach than from a perception-based perspective, which has been the traditional approach to studying consciousness (e.g., Crick and Koch, 2003; see discussion in Baars, 1997). Before discussing further the liaison between consciousness and action control, and what the latter informs about the former, it is important to first describe the most nebulous term at hand, “consciousness.”
Highlights
Introduction to special issue matchesThere are several “comparator models” explaining how intention-outcome mismatches are detected and influence various levels of agency
There are many other experimental paradigms that illuminate the study of consciousness and action control: the anti-saccade task (Hallett, 1978; Curtis and D’Esposito, 2009), the MacLeod and Dunbar object naming task (MacLeod and Dunbar, 1988), spatial compatibility tasks, response-effect compatibility paradigms (Kunde, 2001), the Posner attentional cuing task (1980), dual-task paradigms (Kahneman, 1973; Logan and Gordon, 2001), binocular rivalry (Alais and Blake, 2005), inattentional blindness (Raymond et al, 1992), covert priming paradigms (Bargh and Chartrand, 2000), the implicit association task (Greenwald et al, 1998), and the go/no go (Newman et al, 1985) and stop-signal tasks (Lappin and Eriksen, 1966; see, in this issue, articles by Anguera et al and by Diefenbach et al.)
Complementing research on the sense of agency are investigations on the sense of effort during action control (Sherrington, 1900, 1906; Gandevia, 1982) and the sense of body ownership and of actions generated toward the body
Summary
Introduction to special issue process) is an inescapable contrast that is encountered after even a cursory examination of mental and nervous phenomena. The activation of action plans (a phenomenon to be distinguished from motor control) can occur unintentionally (see Lynn et al, this issue) This has been revealed in experimental paradigms in which the mere presence of incidental action-related stimuli can interfere with one’s intended response to a target stimulus. There are many other experimental paradigms that illuminate the study of consciousness and action control: the anti-saccade task (Hallett, 1978; Curtis and D’Esposito, 2009), the MacLeod and Dunbar object naming task (MacLeod and Dunbar, 1988), spatial compatibility tasks (e.g., the Simon task; Simon et al, 1970), response-effect compatibility paradigms (Kunde, 2001), the Posner attentional cuing task (1980), dual-task paradigms (Kahneman, 1973; Logan and Gordon, 2001), binocular rivalry (Alais and Blake, 2005), inattentional blindness (Raymond et al, 1992), covert priming paradigms (Bargh and Chartrand, 2000), the implicit association task (Greenwald et al, 1998), and the go/no go (Newman et al, 1985) and stop-signal tasks (Lappin and Eriksen, 1966; see, in this issue, articles by Anguera et al and by Diefenbach et al.) Evidence from these paradigms suggests that response interference stems from the automatic, “stimulus-triggered” activation of action plans (DeSoto et al, 2001), as if distractors automatically activate the associated action plans. Research by Wohlschläger (2000) and by ideomotor theorists (e.g., Hommel, 2009) suggests that action-based effects on awareness such as perceptual resonance require, perturbation of the sensorium, but dimensional overlap (e.g., shared spatial dimensions) between actions and percepts (cf., Knuf et al, 2001; Schütz-Bosbach and Prinz, 2007)
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