The Effect of Subjective Time on Goal-Oriented Action

One of the most fundamental aspects that separate humans from other species is their adroitness of strategically manipulating the environment according to their needs and desires. This is of course the manifestation of the ability to generate goal-oriented actions from consciously desired outcomes. However, to define an action as truly goal-oriented, reactions to exogenous or internal effects should be ruled out. For example, the crying behavior of infants might seem as motivated by the attainment of a desired outcome, but it is actually a reaction to an internal imbalance with no definite intention of a particular sensory outcome. Thus, infants’ crying behavior cannot be count as goal-directed since behaviors can only be considered as such when they are conducted by actions derived from intended goals. Meanwhile, both by observing and experiencing actions and their corresponding outcomes, action-outcome associations are formed from the earliest developmental stages. After a developmental threshold is passed at around 9 months of age, such associations become a database available for deriving goal-directed actions.

According to the ideomotor theory that we base our work on, actions (e. g. switching a light button on) and their sensory outcomes (e. g. light) are automatically and bidirectionally associated to form such hypothetical cognitive databases, which are then utilized for selecting appropriate actions for the desired outcomes. More specifically, it is suggested that representations of sensory features are encoded in the same cognitive clusters with the actions that make them occur. Those sensory features are then used for executing motor commands when engaging in goal-oriented behavior. Indeed, results from brain imaging studies revealed that the brain activates neural representations of sensory outcomes when performing the associated actions. In that regard, the motor command that changes an object’s position to an intended place is derived from the sensory representation of the object at the intended space and time. Even though such sensory representation features like color, movement, frequency have been well-studied in ideomotor paradigms, temporal features of action-outcome associations remain in a relatively unexplored area. However, recent research on event- related timing indicates that time might be processed as a sensory aspect in the visual modality, similar to other visuo-sensory components such as contrast, luminance, or color.

Accordingly, we will investigate the hypothesis that the event durations, similar to other sensory features, can be used in action-outcome associations. We will test this overarching hypothesis by conducting series of experiments in which the psychophysical methods will be used. The main goal of our investigation is to uncover the cognitive mechanisms that allow actions to be selected and performed to obtain specific sensory outcomes. We will especially target the temporal aspect of ideomotor actions which constitutes an area yet to be discovered. In this way, we are planning to (i) better understand the ability of goal-directed behavior that makes our species different than the others, (ii) find out how subjective time, as an event feature, is used in action selection processes, and (iii) contribute studies on artificial cognitive systems by supplementing their action-outcome modals.