From thinking to acting: Examining delays of intention fulfillment in everyday life

• Applicant: Dr. Alexander Soemer
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561214890

Being able to plan and perform actions at some point in the future is a fundamental aspect of goal-directed behavior in everyday life. For example, we must plan and remember to shop for groceries on the way home from work, to prepare a presentation for a conference next month, or to workout several times a week in order to maintain health. The intended actions may be simple or complex, one-off or repeated, and they may require completion at specific times or within deadlines. Yet, they all are to be fulfilled at some point in the future, rather than in the very moment they are planned or decided upon. The cognitive processes underlying the fulfillment of future intentions have most thoroughly been investigated within the rapidly developing field of prospective memory. In a typical study in this area of research, participants are instructed to contact the experimenter at a specific point in time in the future (e.g., after several days) without the help of external reminders. Moreover, participants often document their thoughts about the task during the period between instruction and the target date. Employing such a paradigm, researchers have identified several factors that influence the likelihood of timely intention fulfillment as well as potential underlying cognitive processes. However, in contrast to the *point-in-time* type of intentions that have primarily been investigated in the prospective memory literature, intentions in everyday life can often be flexibly realized within an *extended period of time*. Moreover, real-life intentions typically offer numerous opportunities for fulfillment within this period, and they may compete with one another for the same opportunities (e.g., learning for class vs. socializing). Therefore, individuals must not only prioritize some intentions over others when planning their future activities, but also continually assess whether planned, intention-related action must be delayed. To date, however, delays of action in intention fulfillment have seldom been investigated in contexts that allow for a flexible fulfillment within an extended period of time, where individuals have multiple opportunities to perform intention-related action, and where intentions are in competition with one another. Thus, the factors that influence successful intention fulfillment in such contexts and the underlying cognitive processes of intention fulfillment remain understudied. To address this gap in the literature, the present projects aims to conduct a series of field studies on what will be referred to as *deadlined intentions*. By employing an innovative field paradigm that combines experimental and correlational methodology, the project will assess factors that influence delays of action in ecologically valid settings and identify cognitive processes underlying these delays.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants