Towards a mechanistic account of ideomotor action control

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Roland Pfister
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 490927435

How does the mind move the body? How are subjective states – goals, plans, intentions – put into overt action? Ideomotor accounts aim to explain these fundamental questions about human action control by a simple but powerful concept: They assume actions to be represented in terms of their perceivable effects, while these representations are associated bi-directionally with motor centers. Following this assumption, anticipations of to-be produced action effects should thus not only be relevant for deciding between different courses of action. Rather, such anticipations are the only way to plan, initiate, and control overt bodily movements. The last two decades have proliferated empirical findings in support of these basic theoretical tenets. However, while it is clear that action control can be modelled in an ideomotor framework, the current state of the literature has remained in a proof-of-concept state and it is still far from a mechanistic understanding of ideomotor action control. The proposed project will go beyond this state of the art by uncovering how ideomotor action control is actually implemented. It will thus specify and test one of the core theoretical ideas in the field of cognition and action; it will pinpoint the functional characteristics of the process of action-effect anticipation, it will clarify the representational format exploited by ideomotor action control and it will ground the process of acquiring action-effect associations in fundamental theories of human and animal learning. It will thus identify, test and establish critical theoretical properties of the ideomotor linkage to transform the theoretical framework of ideomotor approaches to a specified theory of human action control.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants