In Honor of Professor Dr.Dr. h.c. Heinz Heinzhausen's 60th Birthday

Control Systems Theory, a newly developing theoretical perspective, starts from an important insight into human behaviour: that people attempt to control the world around them as they perceive it. This book brings together for the first time the work of prominent sociologists contributing to the development of this wideranging theoretical paradigm.

"It is not thought as such that can move anything, but thought which is for the sake of something and is practical." This discerning insight, which dates back more than 2000years to Aristotle, seems to have been ignored by most psycholo gists. For more than 40years theories of human action have assumed that cogni tion and action are merely two sides of the same coin. Approaches as different as S-O-R behaviorism,social learning theory, consistency theories,and expectancy value theories of motivation and decision making have one thing in common: they all assume that "thought (or any other type of cognition) can move any thing," that there is a direct path from cognition to behavior. In recent years, we have become more and more aware of the complexities in volved in the relationship between cognition and behavior. People do not always do what they intend to do. Aside from several nonpsychological factors capable of reducing cognition-behavior consistency, there seems to be a set of complex psychological mechanisms which intervene between action-related cognitions, such as beliefs, expectancies, values, and intentions,and the enactment of the be havior suggested by those cognitions. In our recent research we have focused on volitional mechanismus which presumably enhance cognition-behavior consistency by supporting the main tenance of activated intentions and prevent them from being pushed aside by competing action tendencies.

This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction into the areas of human action planning and action control. It discusses the basic theoretical issues and questions in understanding the planning and control of human goal-directed action. The authors begin by presenting an integrative theoretical framework and the neurobiological foundations of action planning and execution. Subsequent chapters discuss how goals are represented and how they guide action control; how perception and action interact; how simple and complex actions are selected and planned; how multitasking works; and how actions are monitored. Topics of interest include: stimulus-triggered selections, rule-based selections, intentional action selections, and intuitive decision-making. Human Action Control is a must-have resource for advanced undergraduates, graduates, and doctorate students in cognitive psychology and related areas, such as the cognitive neurosciences, and developmental and social psychology.

The basic nuts and bolts underlying human behavior remain mysterious from a scientific point of view. Everyday acts — naming an object, suppressing the urge to say something, or grabbing a waiter’s attention with a “cappuccino, please” — remain difficult to understand from a mechanistic standpoint. Despite these challenges, research has begun to illuminate, not only the basic processes underlying human action production, but the role of conscious processing in the control of behavior. This Research Topic, “Consciousness and the Control of Action,” is devoted to surveying and synthesizing these developments from disparate fields of study.

The integration of multisensory information is an essential mechanism in perception and in controlling actions. Research in multisensory integration is concerned with how the information from the different sensory modalities, such as the senses of vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and proprioception, are integrated to a coherent representation of objects. Multisensory integration is central for action control. For instance, when you grasp for a rubber duck, you can see its size and hear the sound it produces. Moreover, identical physical properties of an object can be provided by different senses. You can both see and feel the size of the rubber duck. Even when you grasp for the rubber duck with a tool (e.g. with tongs), the information from the hand, from the effect points of the tool and from the eyes are integrated in a manner to act successfully. Over the recent decade a surge of interest in multisensory integration and action control has been witnessed, especially in connection with the idea that multiple sensory sources are integrated in an optimized way. For this perspective to mature, it will be helpful to delve deeper into the information processing mechanisms and their neural correlates, asking about the range and constraints of this mechanisms, about its localization and involved networks.

A major hallmark in the adaptive control of voluntary action is the ability to anticipate short and long term future events. Anticipation in its various forms is an important prerequisite for (higher order) cognitive abilities such as planning, reasoning and the pursuit of both immediate goals and long-term goals that may even stand in opposition to immediate desires and needs (e.g., to invest in pension funds). Therefore, it is not surprising that diverse and rather independent research lines have evolved, all somehow targeting various anticipatory capacities that are involved in the control of voluntary action and thus, contribute to the uniqueness of human goal-directed behavior. For example, prediction of the incentive value of action outcomes drives goal-directed instrumental behavior (e.g., Dickinson & Balleine, 2000; Rushworth & Behrens, 2008). Similarly, the Ideo-Motor Principle assumes that actions are selected and activated by the mere anticipation of the sensory experience they produce (e.g., James, 1890; Prinz, 1990). Furthermore, the degree of match between intended, anticipated and actual action effects has been proposed to be a major determinant of motor programming and online action corrections (Jeannerod, 1981), motor learning (e.g., Wolpert, Diedrichsen, & Flanagan, 2011), and the subjective sense of causing and controlling an action and its effects (Sense of Agency; e.g., Abell, Happé, & Frith, 2000). The role of anticipation in the control of voluntary action, however, goes far beyond the anticipation of immediate action effects and desired goals. For instance, pre-cues and alerting signals are used for advance preparation of what to do (e.g., Meiran, 1996), when to act or expect an event onset (e.g., Callejas, Lupianez, & Tudela, 2004; Los & van der Heuvel, 2001; Nobre & Coull, 2010) and to anticipate conflict (e.g., Correa, Rao, & Nobre, 2009). Voluntary action is influenced by the anticipation and prediction of mental effort in task processing (e.g., Song & Schwarz, 2008). In addition, the anticipation of long-term future social consequences (e.g., expected aloneness) has been shown to affect cognitive mechanisms involved in logic and reasoning (e.g., Baumeister, Twenge, & Nuss, 2002). Last but not least, learning of statistical contingencies (e.g., conflict frequency) leads to the anticipation and prediction of context-specific executive control requirements (e.g., Crump, Gong, & Milliken, 2006, Dreisbach & Haider, 2006). The aim of the present Research Topic is to provide a platform that offers the possibility of cross-fertilization and enhanced visibility among to date rather segregated research lines.