Priming and Executive Control

我们如何控制自己的思想和行为？ 这是一个古老的问题，渗透到心灵和行为研究的核心。 在试图回答这个问题时，很难避免对“侏儒”的召唤，或本质上运行表演的心灵控制者。 侏儒的问题在于，它回避了控制的基本问题：如果侏儒控制了思想，那么是谁或什么在控制侏儒？在国家科学基金会的资助下，洛根博士和他的同事们将解决侏儒的问题。 其目的是发展理论和实验程序，使我们能够区分思想和行动，由一个人自愿控制（自上而下的控制），从那些由环境方面控制（自下而上的控制）。 这项研究将扩展由NSF资助的关于控制的正式模型的先前工作，其中环境是思想和行动的唯一原因。 这个模型在解释人类行为方面的成功令人惊讶，也提供了很多信息，因为它表明，自上而下的控制对于解释那些看起来像是意志的行为是不必要的。 目前的研究将继续在实验中推动这一想法，参与者必须自愿在两项任务之间切换。 众所周知，任务转换会对表现产生影响，但人们一直在争论这种影响是否反映了自愿控制的工作原理，或者更自动的记忆过程。 拟议的实验和模型有望在这一辩论中取得实质性进展。

How do we control our thoughts and actions? This is a age-old question that penetrates to the heart of studies in mind and behavior. In trying to answer this question, it has been difficult to avoid the invocation of a "homunculus", or controller of the mind that essentially runs the show. The problem with the homunculus is that it sidesteps the fundamental question of control: if the homunculus is controlling the mind, then who or what is controlling the homunculus?With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Logan and his colleagues will tackle the problem of the homunculus. The aim is to develop theory and experimental procedures that allow us to distinguish between thoughts and actions that are controlled voluntarily by a person (top-down control), from those that are controlled by aspects of the environment (bottom-up control). This research will extend prior work funded by NSF on a formal model of control, in which the environment was the only source of causation for thoughts and actions. The success of this model in accounting for human performance was surprising and informative, because it suggested that top-down control was unnecessary to explain behavior that would otherwise appear volitional. The current research will continue to push this idea in the context of experiments in which participants must voluntarily switch between two tasks. Task switching is known to take a toll on performance, but it is debated whether this toll reflects the workings of voluntary control, or more automatic processes of memory. The proposed experiments and models promise to make substantial headway on this debate.