This chapter highlights the importance of the problem of action coding, that is, the cognitive representation of action, for theories of S-R compatibility. An action-concept model of S-R compatibility is presented, based on considerations of Lotze and HarleB on the emergence of voluntary action. It assumes that the cognitive code of any perceivable, movement-contingent event--hence, action effectmis associated with the motor pattern producing it. Accordingly, the cognitive system can, and actually does, use these action-effect codes to choose between actions and to address motor patterns for action generation. That is, acton-effect codes serve for perception as well as for action control, and are thus called action concepts. The explanatory power of the action-concept model is demonstrated for a considerable number of findings from compatibility research. It is argued that such a model could close a theoretical gap in understanding S-R compatibility and the perception-action relationship in general. Introduction: The Problem of Action Coding

The present contribution deals with the relationship between perception and action or, more precisely, with how the perception of action affects action control. Action effects, that is, the specific impact a particular action has on the actor-environment relationship, are what actions are good formthey represent the

"If, in voluntary action properly so-called, the act must be foreseen, it follows that no creature not endowed with divinatory power can perform an act voluntarily for the first time". There is quite a bit of information that William James (1890, p. 487) wanted to communicate to the reader with this sentence. First, he incidentally introduces the probably most common

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 e#ect 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.

The implications of an ideomotor approach to action control were investigated. In Experiment 1, participants made manual responses to letter stimuli and they were presented with response-contingent color patches, i.e., colored action effects. This rendered stimuli of the same color as an action's effect effective primes of that action, suggesting that bilateral associations were created between actions and the effects they produced. Experiment 2 combined this set-up with a manual Stroop task, i.e., participants responded to congruent, neutral, or incongruent color-word compounds. Standard Stroop effects were observed in a control group without action effects and in a group with target-incompatible action effects, but the reaction time Stroop effect was eliminated if actions produced target-compatible color effects (e.g., blue word fi left key fi blue patch). Experiment 3 did not replicate this interaction between target-effect compatibility and color-word congruency with color words as action effects, which rules out semantically based accounts. Theoretical implications for both action-effect acquisition and the Stroop effect are discussed. It is suggested that learning action effects, the features of which overlap with the target, allows and motivates people to recode their actions in ways that make them more stimulus-compatible. This provides a processing shortcut for translating the relevant stimulus into the correct response and, thus, shields processing from the impact of competing word distractors.

Humans perform actions to reach particular goals, that is, to intentionally create or modify personally relevant events---we move our eyes to learn more about a novel event, reach for a cup to quench our thirst, and move our lips to share our thoughts with someone else. Accordingly, even primitive actions must involve some kind of planning, some sort of anticipatory control. Indeed, there are at least three defining features that the simplest behavioral acts share with more complex ones. First, all of them are planned in terms of anticipated goal events. In particular, the first step of action planning consists in specifying the features the action is intended to possess; this is achieved by activating the appropriate action-effect codes, i.e., sensory-motor assemblies controlling the production of those features. Action-effect codes emerge through the perception of movement-effect contingencies, and they are acquired from the first months in life on. Besides action planning they are involved in the perception of both one's own actions and actions of others. Second, selected features of an intended action need to be integrated into a coherent, durable action plan, which is achieved by temporarily "binding" distributed feature codes. Third, planning an action turns the cognitive system into a kind of reflex machinery, which facilitates the proper execution of the plan under appropriate circumstances. This involves the implementation of automatic stimulus-response associations and the increase of the salience of action-related situational information, thereby delegating action control to the environment.

This paper reviews recent approaches to human action planning and the cognitive representation of intentional actions. Evidence suggests that action planning takes place in terms of anticipated features of the intended goal, that is, in terms of action effects. These effects are acquired from early infancy on by registering contingencies between movements and perceptual movement outcomes. Co-occurrence of movements and effects leads to the creation of bidirectional associations between the underlying internal codes, thus establishing distributed perception-action networks subserving both perceiving external events and intentionally producing them. Action plans determine only the general, goal-relevant features of intended actions, while the fine-tuning is left to on-line sensory-motor processing. Action plans emerge from competition for action control between several factors: overlearned habits, perceptual events, and emotional influences, among others. Accordingly, action control represents a balance between personal intentions and wishes on the one hand and environmental affordances and demands on the other. KEYWORDS: action planning, intentional action, goal, perception and action, feedback, action effects, action control, will, priming, imitation, mirror neurons, emotion and action DOMAINS: behavioral psychology, cognition, development, learning and memory, motor processes, sensation and perception, neuroscience, behavior PLANNING AN ACTION Humans perform actions to reach goals, that is, to create or modify some event or state of affairs according to their intentions --- otherwise we would talk of movement but not action. Logically, then, intentional, goal-directed action presupposes some sort of (conscious or unconscious) anticipation of the intended goal event,...

The theory of event coding (TEC) is a general framework explaining how perceived and produced events (stimuli and responses) are cognitively represented and how their representations interact to generate perception and action. This article discusses the implications of TEC for understanding the control of voluntary action and makes an attempt to apply, specify, and concretize the basic theoretical ideas in the light of the available research on action control. In particular, it is argued that the major control operations may take place long before a stimulus is encountered (the prepared-reflex principle), that stimulus-response translation may be more automatic than commonly thought, that action selection and execution are more interwoven than most approaches allow, and that the acquisition of action-contingent events (action effects) is likely to subserve both the selection and the evaluation of actions. Life inside and outside of psychological laboratories differs in many ways, which is particularly true with respect to action control. Outside the lab people seem to carry out actions to achieve particular goals and to adapt the environment according to their needs. Once they enter a lab, however, they are commonly talked into responding to arbitrary stimuli by carrying out meaningless movements. The latter is assumed to increase the amount of experimental control over the variables involved in performing an action, which of course is true and utterly important for disentangling all the confounds present in everyday actions. And yet, most models of action control seem to take this highly artificial

Ideomotor theories of human action control assume that performing a movement leads to the automatic integration of the underlying motor pattern with codes of its perceptual consequences. We studied the microgenesis of action-eVect integration by varying the mapping of action eVects upon actions from trial to trial. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that perceiving a tone repetition systematically aVects one’s tendency to carry out the response that produced that tone in the previous trial, suggesting that even the unintentional production of a stimulus creates a temporary binding of that stimulus with the action that brought it about. Experiments 3 and 4 extended this Wnding in suggesting that the integration and/or retrieval of action eVects is modulated by attentional factors: Ongoing performance is more impacted by action eVects if they are salient or match the current attentional set.

this special issue address, in one way or another, the issue of how mental cues are acquired and/or used to exert cognitive control. Gruber and Goschke provide an overview of how the interplay between working memory, attentional systems, and language may translate our intentions into action. The role of language and inner speech is a particularly recent theme in executive research----a kind of Wygots- Acta Psychologica 115 (2004) 99--104 www.elsevier.com/locate/actpsy 0001-6918/$ - see front matter # 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2003.12.002 kian renaissance. This role was further investigated by Miyake and Emerson in adults and by Kray, Eber, and Lindenberger in children, adults, and elderly people. Miyake and Emerson show that articulatory suppression strongly impairs randomly switching from one task to another if the switch is signaled by a letter but not if it is signaled by a word. This suggests that word cues directly activate the task they are associat