The Continuous Goal Dynamics of Cognitive Control: Combining Behavioral Experiments and Dynamic Field Modelling.
Final Report Abstract
One of the hallmarks of human behavior is its goal-directedness, that is, our ability to pursue the things we desire despite the distractions our daily lives confront us with. In its endeavor to understand goal-directed behavior, cognitive psychology has successfully advanced our knowledge on cognitive control processes, that is, the mechanisms adapting our behavior to the environment by setting, shielding and shifting the goals we pursue. Yet, an issue that received far less attention on this fruitful path is how goals themselves are represented in the cognitive system. The purpose of this project was to shed more light on this issue lying at the very core of goal-driven behavior. Building on a dynamic perspective on cognition, the project aimed to investigate the assumption that goals are continuous patterns of activation that are coupled to the environment through perception and action in realtime. Accordingly, the project addressed two related research questions: (1) How do goals evolve and exert their effect on behavior over time and (2) how are they represented in representational space? In an eye-tracking and an EEG study, which analyzed frontal midline theta osciallations and steady state visual potentials, we showed the temporal dynamics of changing goals that were previously amplified or inhibited. Furthermore, in a mouse tracking study, we used the temporal dynamics of goal adaptation to separate goal related effects from associative effects. With a combination of 2 mouse-tracking and a key-press based study we showed that the dynamics of goals in representational space follow a center-surround-like pattern as typical for activational patterns in working-memory. Our attempts to generalize our findings to other domains, e.g. goals as conceptualized in ideomotor theory and goals in the area of self-control, did not reach the insights that we had hoped for, but brought fruitful insights into the boundary conditions of established effects in ideomotor paradigms and into the differences between cognitive control and self-control, of which the latter stirred interest outside the scientific community (https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/01/22/self-control-and-cognitive-control-are-not-the-same-thing/). Taking together, the insights of our project into the temporal and spatial dynamics of goals challenge and extend popular models of cognitive control and goal-directed behavior and sheds more light on this issues lying at the very core of goal-driven behavior and associated dysfunctions.
Publications
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(2018). No evidence for common processes of cognitive control and self-control. Acta Psychologica, 182, 194–199
Scherbaum, S., Frisch, S., Holfert, A.-M., O’Hora, D., & Dshemuchadse, M.
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(2018). Stuck at the starting line: How the starting procedure influences mouse-tracking data. Behavioral Research Methods, 50(5), 2097–2110
Scherbaum, S., & Kieslich, P. J.
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(2018). The test of both worlds: Identifying feature binding and control processes in congruency sequence tasks by means of action dynamics. Psychological Research, 82, 337–352
Scherbaum, S., Frisch, S., Dshemuchadse, M., Rudolf, M., & Fischer, R.
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(2020). The Continuity of Goal Representations in Time and Representational Space. Technische Universität Dresden. Dissertation
Frisch, S.
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(2020). The impact of the verbal instruction and task characteristics on effect-based action control. Cognitive Processing, 21(2), 271–285
Vogel, D., Rudolf, M., & Scherbaum, S.
