The role of feature integration in action planning

Arbeitsatmosphere in unserer Abteilung. In this chapter it is argued that the mechanisms underlying action planning are faced with the binding problem. First of all, I will discuss how action planning is conceptualized in cognitive psychology. Thereafter, I will describe the binding problem and how it is dealt with in neuroscience and psychology. In the third section the relationship between action planning and the binding problem will be looked at. In section 1.4 the file analogy for the temporal binding of information is discussed. Finally, a new hypothesis based on the considerations about action planning and the binding problem is postulated: the Code-Occupation Hypothesis. 1.1 Action Planning Action planning is the preparation of goal-directed behavior. Most of the time, human behavior is guided by preset goals and intentions, and it is not so much driven by incoming sensory information alone. Thus, in order to understand the underlying processes of human behavior, it is important to understand action planning. A problem for the study of action planning is that it is a very broad concept. On the one hand, action planning includes the preparation of long-term high-level behavior, like preparing a holiday. On the other hand, it includes short-term low-level behavior like pressing a response key. It is an open question whether such different types of action planning are based on the same underlying processes. At any rate, there are different terms for the types of action plans. Most researchers in the domain of action planning distinguish between motor programs and action plans. Motor programs are considered to represent prepared motor behavior on a very small temporal scale, whereas action plans may also represent behavior on a large scale. Furthermore, motor programming is considered to have no conscious component and is thought to lead to motor activity directly (cf. Rosenbaum, 1985). Nevertheless, even very short and simple actions are mostly guided by goals and intentions. The role of intention in such simple 2 Action planning and the binding problem tasks has been given much attention through the task-switching paradigms (cf. Rogers & Monsell, 1995). Action planning, as I understand it, is the construction of a representation with two almost independent main parts. First, there is a goal structure representing the state that has to be reached. Second, there is a rule-like representation which represents the event (or a certain point in time) triggering goal-or a subgoal-oriented movements. For example, if you …