Goal Neglect Research Articles

Development of the acquisition and control of action–effect associations

Voluntary action is anticipatory and, hence, must depend on associations between actions and their perceivable effects. We studied the acquisition of action–effect associations in 4–5-vs. 7-year-old children. Children carried out key-pressing actions that were arranged to produce particular auditory effects. In a subsequent test phase, children were to press keys in response to the previous effect sounds, with the sound–key mapping being either consistent or inconsistent with previous key–sound practice. As the processes underlying voluntary action controls are known to significantly improve between 4 and 7 years of age, it was expected that younger children were more prone to automatic effects of acquired sound–key associations. This hypothesis was confirmed, but reaction times and accuracy measures showed different and dissociable patterns. Four-year-olds but not 7-year-olds were more likely to commit an error––i.e., to perform a sound-compatible rather than the correct action––if the sound–key mapping was inconsistent with previous practice. This effect strongly depended on previous practice, suggesting that it reflects long-term learning. In contrast, reaction time effects of mapping consistency did not depend on previous experience but only on the consistency between stimulus and action effect in the present task. Taken altogether, the results suggest that children acquire response–effect associations automatically and that younger children are more likely to suffer from frequent goal neglect; i.e., they tend to forget the current action goal, so that their behavior is dominated by automatic, stimulus-triggered response tendencies.

Working-memory capacity and the control of attention: The contributions of goal neglect, response competition, and task set to Stroop interference.

Individual differences in working-memory (WM) capacity predicted performance on the Stroop task in 5 experiments, indicating the importance of executive control and goal maintenance to selective attention. When the Stroop task encouraged goal neglect by including large numbers of congruent trials (RED presented in red), low WM individuals committed more errors than did high WM individuals on the rare incongruent trials (BLUE in red) that required maintaining access to the "ignore-the-word" goal for accurate responding. In contrast, in tasks with no or few congruent trials, or in high-congruency tasks that followed low-congruency tasks, WM predicted response-time interference. WM was related to latency, not accuracy, in contexts that reinforced the task goal and so minimized the difficulty of actively maintaining it. The data and a literature review suggest that Stroop interference is jointly determined by 2 mechanisms, goal maintenance and competition resolution, and that the dominance of each depends on WM capacity, as well as the task set induced by current and previous contexts.

Rehabilitation of executive function: facilitation of effective goal management on complex tasks using periodic auditory alerts

The ‘dysexecutive syndrome’ represents a major challenge to functional recovery and adaptation following brain injury—and an important target for rehabilitation. Previous reports of everyday difficulties, and performance on complex, life-like tasks, indicate that an adequately represented goal may become neglected as patients become overly engaged in current activity. Here we examine whether the provision of brief auditory stimuli, acting to interrupt current activity and to cue patients to consider their overall goal, would improve performance in a complex task. Ten brain injured patients completed a modification of Shallice and Burgess' Six Elements task [30] under two conditions. In the ‘Hotel’ test, the patients were asked to try and do some of each of five sub-tasks within 15 min. As the total time to complete all of the tasks would exceed an hour, the measure emphasises patients' ability to monitor the time, switch between the tasks and keep track of their intentions. Without the external auditory cues, the patients performed significantly more poorly than age- and IQ-matched control volunteers, a common error being to continue performing one task to the detriment of beginning or allocating sufficient time to others. When exposed to the interrupting tones, however, their performance was both significantly improved and no longer significantly different from the control group on important variables. The results have value in assessment in helping to attribute poor performance to ‘goal neglect’ rather than, for example, poor memory or comprehension. They also suggest that providing environmental support to one aspect of executive function may facilitate monitoring and behavioural flexibility—and therefore the useful expression of other skills that may be relatively intact.

Goal neglect and inhibitory limitations: dissociable causes of interference effects in conflict situations

Interference effects on task performance in conflict situations might reflect real limitations in inhibitory capabilities or failures to fully or consistently utilize such capabilities in executive control of task performance. We propose that useful clues regarding the actual cause of interference effects may be obtained from examination of their robustness within and between experimental conditions. We illustrate this approach for two major types of interference effects that have commonly been attributed to fundamental inhibitory limitations: Stroop-type interference and residual switch costs. We present results that indicate that these effects may not be unavoidable consequences of fundamental inhibitory limitations but may stem from goal neglect, i.e., failures to fully or effectively deploy inhibitory capabilities. These results indicate that, in addition to mean performance levels, variability of task performance may provide a valuable source of evidence regarding the actual cause of performance limitations or deficits in conflict situations.

Changes in Event-Based Prospective Memory Across Adulthood

Conflicting results in the literature raise the possibility of a nonmonotonic relationship between adult age and event-based prospective memory performance. In this study, young (n = 45; mean age = 20), middle-aged (n = 56; mean age = 59), and elderly (n = 59; mean age = 76) volunteers were shown slides of famous people. The background task was to name each face while the prospective memory task was to mark the trial number if the person was wearing glasses. Although the stimuli were selected to favor the older participants, the proportion of prospective memory responses to target events declined monotonically with increasing age (.77, .62, and .26, for the young, middle-aged, and elderly, respectively). Analysis of the prospective memory data in terms of hazard functions for the first failure and the first success also revealed some significant age deficits. The elderly group reported thinking less about the prospective memory component than the young and middle-aged groups. Also, the elderly group was less likely to blame the demands of the background task for their prospective memory failures than the young and middle-aged groups. However, age differences in prospective memory performance remained significant after controlling (in separate analyses) for past experience (hazard functions), memory for the task instructions, self-rated thoughts, and reasons for failure. The results are discussed in relation to work on goal neglect, and possible explanations for the conflicting results in the literature are presented.

Frontal Lobe Deficits after Head Injury: Unity and Diversity of Function

Deficits of “executive function” are commonly described following either focal frontal lobe lesions or the diffuse pathology of closed head injury. Here, correlational methods were used to investigate common elements in different tests conventionally used to measure executive deficits. Conventional executive CONVEX tests, sometimes adapted to give a variety of performance scores, were administered to a sample of 90 head-injured patients, along with a range of other clinical and neuropsychological measures. Following on from previous reports showing deficits in general intelligence or Spearman's g after frontal lobe lesions, tests relating to g were administered in a more detailed follow-up of 24 patients. The data showed uniformly low correlations between CONVEX tests, no higher indeed than correlations with others tests in the battery. Extracting more detailed scores in search of executive subfunctions such as switching or impulse control simply produced yet lower correlations. Though correlations between CONVEX tests were weak, the common element that these tests did share was closely related to g and to a phenomenon we call goal neglect, or disregard of a known task requirement. In this head-injured sample, goal neglect and g were related more to generalised atrophy than to focal lesions. We suggest that g reflects a process of forming an effective task plan by activation of multiple goals or action constraints. Most tests, including CONVEX tests, are to some extent sensitive to this process. Beyond this very general component, individual CONVEX tests may measure little of broad significance.

Intelligence and the Frontal Lobe: The Organization of Goal-Directed Behavior

Basic to the study of individual differences is the concept of “general intelligence” or Spearman'sg.In this article we suggest thatgis largely a reflection of the control functions of the frontal lobe. A series of experiments investigates a phenomenon we callgoal neglect:disregard of a task requirement even though it has been understood and remembered. Subjectively it is as though the neglected requirement “slips the subject's mind.” Previously described in frontal patients, we show that goal neglect can also be seen in some members of the normal population. In line with conventional distinctions between controlled and automatic processing, eliciting conditions for goal neglect include novelty, weak error feedback, and multiple concurrent task requirements. Under these conditions neglect is linked closely togand extremely common after frontal lesions. Following many other models, we suggest that behavior in any task is structured by a set of action constraints or requirements, derived in part from verbal instructions and specified at multiple levels of abstraction. A frontal process of constraint or requirement activation is fundamental to Spearman'sg.