Affective evaluation of self-produced action-effect episodes

• Applicant: Dr. Robert Wirth
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 540862177

Humans and other biological agents seem to be inclined to generate motor activities that result in foreseeable and immediate perceptual effects, although neither the motor activities nor the ensuing perceptual effects themselves appear particularly attractive. While the reasons for this preference are yet unclear, own pilot research suggests that episodes in which motor activities produce predicted perceptual events come with positive affect. I thus suggest that previous action-effect episodes induce affective signals which are among the factors that determine if and how we enact similar episodes in the future. The current project aims to reveal which components are crucial for the development of such affective evaluation and disentangle their joint contribution. A first step will explore the role of observable individual components of previous action-effect episodes (i.e., stimuli, responses, effects, timing), whereas the second part will dig into the contribution of proposed cognitive representations (i.e. action plans, action-effect linkages). The results of this project will scrutinize the role of affective evaluation in the generation of, and possible preference for, specific action-effect relationships, and will thus lead to a deeper understanding of how affective and cognitive processes jointly govern action control.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants