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，深入到思想和行为研究的核心。在试图回答这个问题时，很难避免求助于一个“侏儒”，或者说是精神的控制者，它实际上是一切的操纵者。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，使我们能够区分由个人自愿控制的思想和行动（自上而下的控制）与由环境方面控制的思想和行动（自下而上的控制）。这项研究将扩展先前由美国国家科学基金会资助的关于控制的正式模型的工作，在控制模型中，环境是思想和行为的唯一因果来源。这个模型在解释人类表现方面的成功是令人惊讶和有意义的，因为它表明，自上而下的控制对于解释行为是不必要的，否则就会出现意志。目前的研究将继续在实验的背景下推动这一想法，在实验中，参与者必须自愿在两个任务之间切换。众所周知，任务切换会对性能造成影响，但这种影响反映的是自愿控制的工作，还是更多的是记忆的自动过程，这一点一直存在争议。拟议的实验和模型有望在这场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.