Action,Control and Sensations of Acting

Sensations of acting and control have been neglected in theory of action. I argue that they form the core of action and are integral and indispensible parts of our actions, participating as they do in feedback loops consisting of our intentions in acting, the bodily movements required for acting and the sensations of acting. These feedback loops underlie all activities in which we engage when we act and generate our control over our movements.The events required for action according to the causal theory, or Searle’s theory, do not add up to agency. I find the agent at work, her engagement in her action, in her sensation of acting.It is often thought that bodily movements are either mere events or actions. I suggest that there is a third possibility: that they are activities which are not actions. Activities, whether they are actions or not, differ from mere events in that they are controlled from within the brain. They are actions only if this control forms agent control, that is, control in which the conscious mind, the agents’ intentions in acting and her sensations of acting, participates.Internally wayward actions are characterized by the fact that the person involved does not have a sensation of action and therefore does not control her movements. In the absence of such a sensation she does not act.     

On Some Counter-Examples to the Guise of the Good-Thesis: Intelligibility without Desirability

This paper argues that there are cases, which various guise of the good-theses concerning desires, intentions and actions would not allow. In these cases the agent acts for considerations that the agent does not regard as good reasons. The considerations render the actions intelligible but not desirable (where desirability and intelligibility can be objective or subjective). These cases are atypical, but nonetheless show that those guise of the good-theses which do not allow them, should be revised. In typical cases the intelligibility of desires, intentions and actions co-varies with their desirability: there are both unintelligible cases without suitable desirability characteristics and cases where desirability characteristics make the desire, intention and action intelligible. The claim here is that there are further more atypical and puzzling, but equally possible cases, where intelligibility and desirability come apart. The paper first introduces the Guise of the Good - debates about desires, intentions, and actions, and suggests distinguishing the category of “acting for a reason” from “acting for a consideration not taken to be a reason”. It then argues that while desirability entails intelligibility, and lack of intelligibility entails lack of desirability, these two cases leave conceptual room for a third category, which is that of intelligibility without desirability. This is so, whether we examine objective or subjective intelligibility and desirability. The claim is meant to apply mutatis mutandis to characteristics of desires, intentions and actions. The paper then provides possible cases of intelligibility without desirability, and defends the view against some objections.     

Decomposing the action effect: How simple actions affect subsequent perception

Simple actions toward an object cause people to allocate attention preferentially toward properties of that object in subsequent unrelated tasks. We show here that it is not necessary to process or attend to any properties of the object in order to obtain the effect: Even when participants knew prior to the object’s onset that they would be acting, the effects of the object remained. Furthermore, the effect remained when the action had no visible effect on the object. In addition, we examined the extent to which the effect may be due to goal updating (which is necessary only on trials that require action) and found that the effect remained even when goal updating was not necessary. The results reveal that a simple action does, indeed, affect perception and have implications for understanding vision as individuals make actions in naturally occurring behavior.     

Interplay between action and movement intentions during social interaction

Observing the movements of another person influences the observer's intention to execute similar movements. However, little is known about how action intentions formed prior to movement planning influence this effect. In the experiment reported here, we manipulated the congruency of movement intentions and action intentions in a pair of jointly acting individuals (i.e., a participant paired with a confederate coactor) and investigated how congruency influenced performance. Overall, participants initiated actions faster when they had the same action intention as the coactor (i.e., when participants and the coactor were pursuing the same conceptual goal). Participants' responses were also faster when their and the coactor's movement intentions were directed to the same spatial location, but only when participants had the same action intention as the coactor. These findings suggest that observers use the same representation to implement their own action intentions that they use to infer other people's action intentions and also that a dynamic, multitiered intentional mechanism is involved in the processing of other people's actions.     

Intentions,Permissibility, and Choice

T. M. Scanlon has argued that the intentions with which one acts, or more specifically, one’s reasons for acting, are non-derivatively irrelevant to the moral permissibility of one’s actions. According to one of his arguments in favor of that thesis, it can be permissible to act for one reason rather than another only if one can choose to act for a reason but, since that choice is impossible since believing as will is impossible, one can be permitted to act but one cannot be permitted to act for a reason. This paper aims to show that that argument is unsound. It first argues that the assumption that choosing an action is necessary for it being an object of a moral duty or permission cannot be made consistent with Scanlon’s idea that the same does not hold for an action being an object of blame. It then argues that even if direct control over forming beliefs is impossible, it is not impossible to choose one’s reason for action and, therefore, to be permitted or forbidden to act for it.     

Nine-months-old infants do not need to know what the agent prefers in order to reason about its goals: on the role of preference and persistence in infants' goal-attribution

Human infants readily interpret others' actions as goal-directed and their understanding of previous goals shapes their expectations about an agent's future goal-directed behavior in a changed situation. According to a recent proposal (Luo & Baillargeon, 2005), infants' goal-attributions are not sufficient to support such expectations if the situational change involves broadening the set of choice-options available to the agent, and the agent's preferences among this broadened set are not known. The present study falsifies this claim by showing that 9-month-olds expect the agent to continue acting towards the previous goal even if additional choice-options become available for which there is no preference-related evidence. We conclude that infants do not need to know about the agent's preferences in order to form expectations about its goal-directed actions. Implications for the role of action persistency and action selectivity are discussed.     

The early development of human mirror mechanisms: evidence from electromyographic recordings at 3 and 6 months

In primates and adult humans direct understanding of others' action is provided by mirror mechanisms matching action observation and action execution (e.g. Casile, Caggiano & Ferrari, 2011). Despite the growing body of evidence detailing the existence of these mechanisms in the adult human brain, their origins and early development are largely unknown. In this study, for the first time, electromyographic (EMG) measures were used to shed light on the emergence of mirror motor mechanisms in infancy. EMG activity was recorded while 6‐ and 3‐month‐old infants watched two videos displaying an agent reaching for, grasping and bringing an object either to the mouth or to the head. Results indicate that the motor system of 6‐month‐olds, but not 3‐month‐olds, was recruited and selectively modulated during observation of the goal‐directed actions, favoring the idea that mirror mechanisms driving action understanding gradually emerge during early development.     

The intentionality of intention and action

This article presents a sketch of a theory of action. It does so by locating the relation of intention to action ‐vithin a general theory of Intentionality. It introduces a distinction between ptiorintentions and intentions in actions; the concept of the experience of acting; and the thesis that both prior intentions and intentions in action are causally self‐referential. Each of these is independently motivated, but together they allow suggested solutions to several outstanding problems within action theory (deviant causal chains, the accordion effect, basic actions, etc.); the demonstration of striking similarities between the logical structure of intentional action and the logical structure of perception; and the construction of an account of simple actions. A successfully performed intentional action characteristically consists of an intention in action together with the bodily movement or state of the agent which is its condition of satisfaction and which is caused by it. The account is extended to complex actions.     

Do you see what I see? Infants’ reasoning about others’ incomplete perceptions

Twelve‐month‐olds realize that when an agent cannot see an object, her incomplete perceptions still guide her goal‐directed actions. What would happen if the agent had incomplete perceptions because she could see only one part of the object, for example one side of a screen? In the present research, 16‐month‐olds were first shown an agent who always pointed to a red object, as opposed to a black or a yellow object, suggesting that she preferred red over the other colours. Next, two screens were introduced while the agent was absent. The screens were (1) red or green on both sides; (2) red on the front (infants’ side) but green on the back (the agent’s side) or vice versa; or (3) only coloured red or green on the front. During test, the agent, who could see only the back of the screens, pointed to one of the two screens. The results revealed that while infants expected the agent to continue acting on her colour preference and point to the red rather than the green screen during test, they did so in accord with the agent’s perception of the screens, rather than their own perceptions: they expected the agent to point to the red screen in (1), but to the green‐front screen in (2), and they had no prediction of which screen the agent should point to in (3). The implications of the present findings for early psychological reasoning research are discussed.     

The intentionality of intention and action

Cognitive Science is likely to make little progress in the study of human behavior until we have a clear account of what a human action is. The aim of this paper is to present a sketch of a theory of action. I will locate the relation of intention to action within a general theory of Intentionality. I will introduce a distinction between prior intentions and intentions in actions; the concept of the experience of acting; and the thesis that both prior intentions and intentions in action are causally selfreferential. Each of these is independently motivated, but together they enable me to suggest solutions to several outstanding problems within action theory (deviant causal chains, the accordian effect, basic actions, etc.), to show how the logical structure of intentional action is strikingly like the logical structure of perceptions, and to construct an account of simple actions. A successfully performed intentional action characteristically consists of an intention in action together with the bodily movement or state of the agent which is its condition of satisfaction and which is caused by it. The account is extended to complex actions.     

基于成本最小化信息的社会性意图识别：来自脑电和行为的证据

与已有研究着重考察如何识别客体导向性意图(动作以物理对象为目标, 而不涉及其他人)不同, 本研究对人们如何识别社会性意图(动作以指向社会主体为目标以影响对方的交互行为)进行了探讨。基于两交互主体在整体层面应遵循效用最大化的分析, 提出当A协助B达成目标状态所需要的成本小于B单独实现该目标状态所需要的成本时(简称为成本最小化信息), 其可被识别为具有社会性意图。通过在B面前设置栅栏的方法操纵成本最小化信息, 以指示不同意图类型的脑电μ抑制程度、对不同变化的敏感性(辨别力)为指标, 对该假设进行了检验。结果显示, 相比客体导向性意图的控制条件(即A将目标物苹果放置在石头前), 当A将目标物苹果放置在被栅栏挡住的B前, 其动作可减少B单独获取该苹果的动作成本, 即符合成本最小化条件时, μ的抑制程度更高(实验1), 且对结构改变(某两个动画中充当相同角色的智能体互换)的辨别力更强, 但对角色交换(某个动画中两个智能体的角色交换)的辨别力更弱(实验3a); 而当栅栏不存在时, 虽然A的运动路径与实验1相同, 但A将苹果放置在B前的成本大于B自身获取苹果的成本, 即不符合成本最小化条件, 条件间μ抑制的差异消失(实验2), 且对不同动作模式中变化的辨别相当(实验3b)。鉴于已有研究表明社会性意图所诱发的μ抑制强于客体导向性意图, 且人们对存在社会性意图的两个智能体间的结构改变更容易辨别, 而对角色交换不敏感, 故上述结果揭示, 两个个体的行为是否满足成本最小化影响人们对动作意图的识别, 支持成本最小化信息是社会性意图识别线索的观点。     

Goal saliency boosts infants’ action prediction for human manual actions,but not for mechanical claws

Previous research indicates that infants’ prediction of the goals of observed actions is influenced by own experience with the type of agent performing the action (i.e., human hand vs. non-human agent) as well as by action-relevant features of goal objects (e.g., object size). The present study investigated the combined effects of these factors on 12-month-olds’ action prediction. Infants’ (N = 49) goal-directed gaze shifts were recorded as they observed 14 trials in which either a human hand or a mechanical claw reached for a small goal area (low-saliency goal) or a large goal area (high-saliency goal). Only infants who had observed the human hand reaching for a high-saliency goal fixated the goal object ahead of time, and they rapidly learned to predict the action goal across trials. By contrast, infants in all other conditions did not track the observed action in a predictive manner, and their gaze shifts to the action goal did not change systematically across trials. Thus, high-saliency goals seem to boost infants’ predictive gaze shifts during the observation of human manual actions, but not of actions performed by a mechanical device. This supports the assumption that infants’ action predictions are based on interactive effects of action-relevant object features (e.g., size) and own action experience.     

Practical understanding

Well-functioning agents ordinarily have an excellent epistemic relationship to their intentional actions. This phenomenon is often characterized as knowledge of what one is doing and labeled “practical knowledge”. But when we examine it carefully, it seems to require a particular kind of understanding - understanding of the normative structure of one's action. Three lines of argument are offered to support this Necessity of Understanding thesis. The first appeals to the nature of intentional action and the second to our everyday reasons explanation of action. The final line of argument draws on a practical amnesia case in which an agent forgets her overall goal while acting. Implications of the Necessity of Understanding thesis for the widely endorsed non-observational view of practical knowledge are briefly discussed. It is argued that support for the non-observational view is weaker than has been appreciated.     

Will any doll do? 12-month-olds' reasoning about goal objects

Infants as young as 5 months of age view familiar actions such as reaching as goal-directed (Woodward, 1998), but how do they construe the goal of an actor's reach? Six experiments investigated whether 12-month-old infants represent reaching actions as directed to a particular individual object, to a narrowly defined object category (e.g., an orange dump truck), or to a more broadly defined object category (e.g., any truck, vehicle, artifact, or inanimate object). The experiments provide evidence that infants are predisposed to represent reaching actions as directed to categories of objects at least as broad as the basic level, both when the objects represent artifacts (trucks) and when they represent people (dolls). Infants do not use either narrower category information or spatiotemporal information to specify goal objects. Because spatiotemporal information is central to infants' representations of inanimate object motions and interactions, the findings are discussed in relation to the development of object knowledge and action representations.     

Action comprehension in non-human primates: motor simulation or inferential reasoning?

Some argue that action comprehension is intimately connected with the observer's own motor capacities, whereas others argue that action comprehension depends on non-motor inferential mechanisms. We address this debate by reviewing comparative studies that license four conclusions: monkeys and apes extract the meaning of an action (i) by going beyond the surface properties of actions, attributing goals and intentions to the agent; (ii) by using environmental information to infer when actions are rational; (iii) by making predictions about an agent's goal, and the most probable action to obtain the goal given environmental constraints; (iv) in situations in which they are physiologically incapable of producing the actions. Motor theories are, thus, insufficient to account for primate action comprehension in the absence of inferential mechanisms.     

You Can't Always Get What You Want: Infants Understand Failed Goal-Directed Actions

ABSTRACT— At what age do infants understand that goals exist independently of the actions that result from them? Exploring infants' understanding of failed intentional actions—when the goal of the action is unfulfilled and thus not apparent in the actor's movements—is a critical step in answering this question. Using a visual habituation paradigm, we assessed when infants understand that a failed intentional action is goal directed and whether an understanding of successful intentional actions (actions that do overtly attain their goals) precedes an understanding of failed intentional actions. Results demonstrated that 10- and 12-month-olds recognized the goal directedness of both successful and failed reaching actions. Eight-month-olds also recognized the goal directedness of successful actions, but not of unsuccessful attempts. Thus, by the end of the 1st year of life, infants possess an impressive understanding of intentional action, and an understanding of failed intentional actions follows an earlier understanding of successful ones.     

Intention and Motor Representation in Purposive Action

Are there distinct roles for intention and motor representation in explaining the purposiveness of action? Standard accounts of action assign a role to intention but are silent on motor representation. The temptation is to suppose that nothing need be said here because motor representation is either only an enabling condition for purposive action or else merely a variety of intention. This paper provides reasons for resisting that temptation. Some motor representations, like intentions, coordinate actions in virtue of representing outcomes; but, unlike intentions, motor representations cannot feature as premises or conclusions in practical reasoning. This implies that motor representation has a distinctive role in explaining the purposiveness of action. It also gives rise to a problem: were the roles of intention and motor representation entirely independent, this would impair effective action. It is therefore necessary to explain how intentions interlock with motor representations. The solution, we argue, is to recognise that the contents of intentions can be partially determined by the contents of motor representations. Understanding this content‐determining relation enables better understanding how intentions relate to actions.     

Effects of Directed Thinking on Intentions to Engage in Beneficial Activities: Idea Generation or Mental Simulation?

How might people best persuade themselves to engage in beneficial activities, such as dieting, exercise, and studying? One strategy is to think about actions. Another strategy is to think about reasons. In previous research, students who were directed to think about actions increased their study intentions more than did students who were directed to think about reasons. The present experiment tested whether thinking about actions was effective because of idea generation (coming up with the thoughts) or because of mental simulation (imagining the scenarios). In immediate and delayed measures, directed thinking about actions (but not reasons) proved generally more effective when students focused on mental simulation than when they focused on idea generation. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed.     

Priming of reach trajectory when observing actions: Hand-centred effects

When another person's actions are observed it appears that these actions are simulated, such that similar motor processes are triggered in the observer. Much evidence suggests that such simulation concerns the achievement of behavioural goals, such as grasping a particular object, and is less concerned with the specific nature of the action, such as the path the hand takes to reach the goal object. We demonstrate that when observing another person reach around an obstacle, an observer's subsequent reach has an increased curved trajectory, reflecting motor priming of reach path. This priming of reach trajectory via action observation can take place under a variety of circumstances: with or without a shared goal, and when the action is seen from a variety of perspectives. However, of most importance, the reach path priming effect is only evoked if the obstacle avoided by another person is within the action (peripersonal) space of the observer.     

One‐year‐old infants use teleological representations of actions productively

Two experiments investigated whether infants represent goal‐directed actions of others in a way that allows them to draw inferences to unobserved states of affairs (such as unseen goal states or occluded obstacles). We measured looking times to assess violation of infants' expectations upon perceiving either a change in the actions of computer‐animated figures or in the context of such actions. The first experiment tested whether infants would attribute a goal to an action that they had not seen completed. The second experiment tested whether infants would infer from an observed action the presence of an occluded object that functions as an obstacle. The looking time patterns of 12‐month‐olds indicated that they were able to make both types of inferences, while 9‐month‐olds failed in both tasks. These results demonstrate that, by the end of the first year of life, infants use the principle of rational action not only for the interpretation and prediction of goal‐directed actions, but also for making productive inferences about unseen aspects of their context. We discuss the underlying mechanisms that may be involved in the developmental change from 9 to 12 months of age in the ability to infer hypothetical (unseen) states of affairs in teleological action representations.