Th e Mechanisms of Human Action : Introduction and Background

1 unconsciously? How does an idea such as a mental image of a tree lead to the movements of a pen or paintbrush? Th ese are exciting times because such questions are beginning to be answered scientifi cally. It is our hope that this book will address most if not all questions regarding the nuts and bolts of human action, questions that have been surprisingly neglected in the history of experimental psychology (Nattkemper & Ziessler, 2004). Oversight of this important topic stemmed in part from the rigid, nonrepresentational stance of the behaviorist era and from psychology’s overall preference of the problem of knowledge representation, as in perception and memory, over that of action (Rosenbaum, 2005). A few minutes at a local café allow one to appreciate the wide array of actions that humans are capable of expressing— reading the newspaper, waiting for a friend, shaking hands, grabbing the waiter’s attention with a “cappuccino, please.” Some actions at the café may be refl exive, automatic, voluntary, social, communicative, or refl ect that hidden resource called “will power.” As ordinary as these actions are, they remain exceedingly diffi cult to understand from a scientifi c point of view. What are the neural and cognitive mechanisms by which actions are learned, mentally stored, and expressed? What is the diff erence between actions that are mediated consciously and those that are mediated Abstract