Anticipative control of voluntary action: Towards a computational model

Abstract

Human action is goal-directed and must thus be guided by anticipations of wanted action effects. How anticipatory action control is possible and how it can emerge from experience is the topic of the ideomotor approach to human action. The approach holds that movements are automatically integrated with representations of their sensory effects, so that reactivating the representation of a wanted effect by "thinking of it" leads to a reactivation of the associated movement. We present a broader theoretical framework of human perception and action control-the Theory of Event Coding (TEC)-that is based on the ideomotor principle, and discuss our recent attempts to implement TEC by means of a computational model (HiTEC) to provide an effective control architecture for artificial systems and cognitive robots. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.