Acquisition and Control of Voluntary Action

This chapter deals with the cognitive underpinnings of voluntary action, here defined as goal-directed behaviour. It is delineates how voluntary action emerges through the automatic acquisition of bilateral associations between cognitive codes of movement patterns and sensory movement effects. Once acquired, these associations can be used in the backward direction to choose movement patterns by activating codes of intended outcomes (the Lotze-Harleß principle). Actions are planned by specifying the features of intended outcomes, binding the activated feature codes, and integrating them with features of anticipated trigger stimuli. Integrated action plans are then carried out automatically as soon as the trigger stimulus is encountered. William James (1890), one of the grand old men in cognitive psychology, was not particularly enthusiastic about definitions. A good (though not the best known) example is the way he introduces readers of his famous Principles of Psychology into chapter XXVI on the Will: "Desire, wish, will", he wrote, "are states of mind which everyone knows, and which no definition can make plainer" (Vol. 2, p. 486). However, he does go on to provide a little more detail: "We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we will that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real; and real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing or after certain preliminaries have been fulfilled. As far as cognitive psychology in concerned, these terms are outdated and no longer in use, as are other terms so obviously tied to introspective experience. However, James' basic approach to understand voluntary action as goal-oriented movement, directed toward anticipated action effects, is perfectly consistent with the perspective of more recent authors. For example, according to Ach (1910, p. 256) a voluntary action "represents the realization of the anticipated concrete content of an act of will" (translated by the author); Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960) describe voluntary action as movements that are steered towards anticipated goals by superordinate plans; Heckhausen (1991, p. 12) believes that "an action comprises all activities which pursue the same 'goal idea'"–and many more examples of this sort can be found in Pongratz (1984) and Hoffmann (1993). In contrast to James, however, later authors often did not …