Visuospatial Short-Term Memory Explains Deficits in Tower Task Planning in High-Functioning Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Previous findings on planning abilities in individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFA) are inconsistent. Exploring possible reasons for these mixed findings, the current study investigated the involvement of memory in planning performance in 15 children with HFA and 17 typically developing controls. In addition to planning abilities (measured with the Tower of London), short-term memory and delayed recall for verbal as well as visuospatial material were assessed. Findings suggest that particularly reduced efficiency in visuospatial short-term memory is associated with Tower task planning deficits in children with HFA.     

Predicting changes in planning behaviour and physical activity among adults

Though the effect of action planning upon behavioural enactment is becoming well-established, adherence to planning interventions are modest. Motivations specific to action planning may predict planning behaviour. The primary purpose of the present study was to determine if theory of planned behaviour constructs operationalized for planning could predict change in planning behaviour. The secondary purpose was to determine if planning behaviour predicted changes in physical activity. Participants (n = 337, M_age = 31 ± 5) were adults with intentions to be more active who completed measures of affective and instrumental attitudes towards planning, subjective norms towards planning, perceived behavioural control over planning, intentions to plan, self-reported planning behaviour, intentions to be active and self-reported physical activity at baseline (T1) and after four weeks (T2). Affective attitudes towards planning (β = 0.10, p < .05), instrumental attitudes towards planning (β = 0.22; p < .01) subjective norms over planning (β = 0.12, p < .01) and perceived behavioural control over planning (β = 0.53, p < .01) predicted intentions to plan (adj. R² = 0.66). Intentions to plan (β = 0.16, p < .05) and intentions to be active (β = −0.25, p < .05) predicted change in planning behaviour (R²_change = 0.03). Planning behaviour (β = 0.27, p < .05) predicted change in physical activity (R²_change = 0.07). Planning behaviour appears to have its own motivations distinct from those of physical activity. Future interventions should target planning behaviour along with its motivations and control beliefs to increase rates of planning. The theoretical underpinnings of the TPB are of value for understanding both planning behaviour and physical activity.     

Understanding action control of resistance training among adults

BackgroundRegular muscle and bone strengthening activities through resistance training (RT) have been associated with numerous health benefits, particularly as adults age, yet participation is low. Effective promotion is likely founded on an understanding of theory-based correlates, yet almost all RT research has focused on college-aged convenience samples and employed social cognition models, which do not consider the intention-behavior gap. The purpose of this study was to explore RT from the perspective of the multi-process action control (M-PAC) framework in a large Canadian adult sample.MethodCanadian adults (N = 1338) completed M-PAC measures of reflective (instrumental attitude, affective attitude, perceived capability and opportunity), regulatory (planning and self-monitoring), and reflexive (habit, identity) processes as well as intention to engage in RT at baseline and RT behavior two-weeks later.ResultsThree intention-behavior profiles emerged: a) non-intenders who were not active (41.4%), b) unsuccessful intenders who failed to enact their positive intentions (32.9%), and c) successful intenders who engaged in RT (23.5%). A discriminant function analysis (p < .01) showed that instrumental and affective attitude, perceived opportunity and planning/self-monitoring distinguished between all three intention-behavior profiles, while perceived capability predicted the intention-RT profiles of females but not males (p < .01). By comparison, identity was particularly important to younger/middle-aged adults than older females (p < .01), while habit was associated with the intention-RT profiles of older adults but not younger/middle-aged adults (p < .01).ConclusionsThe findings support the importance of considering both intention formation and translation in RT. Behavior change techniques aimed at reflective, regulatory, and reflexive processes appear necessary. Additional considerations of targeting specific constructs by age and sex may maximize the potential effectiveness of RT interventions.     

Depression impairs the ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions: Evidence from the Garner task

We assessed dysphoric and clinically distressed individuals' ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions using the Garner speeded‐classification task. Garner's paradigm tests the ability to selectively focus on a single relevant dimension while ignoring variations on other, irrelevant, ones. In the present task, the stimuli were faces of men and women expressing happy, angry, and neutral emotions. In Experiments 1 and 2, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants performed the Garner task, focusing on gender and ignoring emotion (Experiment 1) and focusing on emotion and ignoring gender (Experiment 2). Results suggest that dysphoric individuals exhibited more difficulty ignoring the emotional dimension of social stimuli even under specific instructions to do so than nondysphoric individuals. In Experiments 3 and 4, we replicated these results in clinically distressed and nondistressed individuals. The results of Experiment 3 further suggested that depression was more closely associated with the inability to selectively ignore emotion than was social anxiety. Experiment 4 confirmed that this failure of selective attention was specific to processing emotional, and not gender features. The implications of these findings for cognitive and interpersonal theories of depression are discussed.     

Discrepancy between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency: Implications for sense of agency and its disorders

The sense of agency refers to the feeling of authorship that “I am the one who is controlling external events through my own action”. A distinction between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency has been proposed theoretically. However, there has not been sufficient experimental evidence to support this distinction. We have assessed separate explicit and implicit agency measures in the same population and investigated their relationships. Intentional binding task was employed as an implicit measure and self-other attribution task as an explicit measure, which are known to reflect clinical symptoms of disorders in the sense of agency. The results of the implicit measure and explicit measure were not correlated, suggesting dissociation of the explicit judgement of agency and the implicit feeling of agency.     

A hybrid POMDP-BDI agent architecture with online stochastic planning and plan caching

This article presents an agent architecture for controlling an autonomous agent in stochastic, noisy environments. The architecture combines the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) model with the belief-desire-intention (BDI) framework. The Hybrid POMDP-BDI agent architecture takes the best features from the two approaches, that is, the online generation of reward-maximizing courses of action from POMDP theory, and sophisticated multiple goal management from BDI theory. We introduce the advances made since the introduction of the basic architecture, including (i) the ability to pursue and manage multiple goals simultaneously and (ii) a plan library for storing pre-written plans and for storing recently generated plans for future reuse. A version of the architecture is implemented and is evaluated in a simulated environment. The results of the experiments show that the improved hybrid architecture outperforms the standard POMDP architecture and the previous basic hybrid architecture for both processing speed and effectiveness of the agent in reaching its goals.     

Plans or Outcomes: How Do We Attribute Intelligence to Others?

Humans routinely make inferences about both the contents and the workings of other minds based on observed actions. People consider what others want or know, but also how intelligent, rational, or attentive they might be. Here, we introduce a new methodology for quantitatively studying the mechanisms people use to attribute intelligence to others based on their behavior. We focus on two key judgments previously proposed in the literature: judgments based on observed outcomes (you're smart if you won the game) and judgments based on evaluating the quality of an agent's planning that led to their outcomes (you're smart if you made the right choice, even if you didn't succeed). We present a novel task, the maze search task (MST), in which participants rate the intelligence of agents searching a maze for a hidden goal. We model outcome-based attributions based on the observed utility of the agent upon achieving a goal, with higher utilities indicating higher intelligence, and model planning-based attributions by measuring the proximity of the observed actions to an ideal planner, such that agents who produce closer approximations of optimal plans are seen as more intelligent. We examine human attributions of intelligence in three experiments that use MST and find that participants used both outcome and planning as indicators of intelligence. However, observing the outcome was not necessary, and participants still made planning-based attributions of intelligence when the outcome was not observed. We also found that the weights individuals placed on plans and on outcome correlated with an individual's ability to engage in cognitive reflection. Our results suggest that people attribute intelligence based on plans given sufficient context and cognitive resources and rely on the outcome when computational resources or context are limited.