Cognitive Neurophysiology, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, TU Dresden, Germany, Schubertstr. 42, 01307, Dresden, Germany.
Institute for Psychological Research, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Psychol Res. 2022 Jun;86(4):1054-1077. doi: 10.1007/s00426-021-01563-w. Epub 2021 Jul 29.
Commonsense and theorizing about action control agree in assuming that human behavior is (mainly) driven by goals, but no mechanistic theory of what goals are, where they come from, and how they impact action selection is available. Here I develop such a theory that is based on the assumption that GOALs guide Intentional Actions THrough criteria (GOALIATH). The theory is intended to be minimalist and parsimonious with respect to its assumptions, as transparent and mechanistic as possible, and it is based on representational assumptions provided by the Theory of Event Coding (TEC). It holds that goal-directed behavior is guided by selection criteria that activate and create competition between event files that contain action-effect codes matching one or more of the criteria-a competition that eventually settles into a solution favoring the best-matching event file. The criteria are associated with various sources, including biological drives, acquired needs (e.g., of achievement, power, or affiliation), and short-term, sometimes arbitrary, instructed aims. Action selection is, thus, a compromise that tries to satisfy various criteria related to different driving forces, which are also likely to vary in strength over time. Hence, what looks like goal-directed action emerges from, and represents an attempt to satisfy multiple constraints with different origins, purposes, operational characteristics, and timescales-which among other things does not guarantee a high degree of coherence or rationality of the eventual outcome. GOALIATH calls for a radical break with conventional theorizing about the control of goal-directed behavior, as it among other things questions existing cognitive-control theories and dual-route models of action control.
常识和行动控制理论都认为，人类行为主要是由目标驱动的，但目前还没有关于目标是什么、目标从何而来以及目标如何影响行为选择的机械论理论。在这里，我提出了这样一种理论，即假设目标通过标准来指导意向行动（GOALIATH）。该理论旨在在假设方面尽可能保持极简和简约，尽可能透明和机械，并且基于事件编码理论（TEC）提供的表示假设。它认为，目标导向的行为是由选择标准指导的，这些标准激活并在包含与一个或多个标准匹配的动作-效果代码的事件文件之间产生竞争-这种竞争最终会形成一个有利于最佳匹配事件文件的解决方案。标准与各种来源相关联，包括生物驱动、后天需求（如成就、权力或归属）以及短期的、有时是任意的指令目标。因此，行动选择是一种妥协，试图满足与不同驱动力相关的各种标准，这些驱动力在时间上也很可能会发生变化。因此，看起来像是目标导向的行为是从多个起源、目的、操作特征和时间尺度的多个约束中产生的，并试图满足这些约束，这除其他外，不能保证最终结果具有高度的一致性或合理性。GOALIATH 要求与传统的目标导向行为控制理论彻底决裂，因为它质疑现有的认知控制理论和行动控制的双重路径模型。
