Ezequiel Morsella

The basic nuts and bolts underlying human behavior remain mysterious from a scientific point of view. Everyday acts -- naming an object, suppressing the urge to say something, or grabbing a waiter's attention with a "cappuccino, please" -- remain difficult to understand from a mechanistic standpoint. Despite these challenges, research has begun to illuminate, not only the basic processes underlying human action production, but the role of conscious processing in the control of behavior. This Research Topic, "Consciousness and the Control of Action," is devoted to surveying and synthesizing these developments from disparate fields of study.

In 1959, Neal Miller made the bold claim that the Stimulus–Response, Behaviorist models of that era were describing the way in which stimuli lead to the entry of contents into consciousness. Today, researchers have begun to investigate the link between external stimuli and involuntary entry, using paradigms such as the reflexive imagery task, the focus of our review. The RIT has revealed that stimuli can elicit insuppressible entry of high-level cognitions. Knowledge of the boundary conditions of the RIT effect illuminates the limitations of involuntary processes and the role of consciousness in the regulation of behavior. We review the boundary conditions of this paradigm as well as its systematic effects. Systematic effects are unlikely to be due to experimental demand. While reviewing each effect, we consider its theoretical implications. In addition, throughout our review, we discuss future directions for the study of insuppressible entry using the RIT. Last, we discuss a theoretical development that stems from the RIT and illuminates how involuntary entry and encapsulation, though at times disadvantageous for the actor, are essential for adaptive action selection during the course of ontogeny.

Investigations of human action have led to the conclusion that much action production can occur unconsciously. Behaviors such as reflexes and automatisms in neurological conditions reveal that action production can be mediated unconsciously. Less obvious, however, are the unconscious mechanisms associated with everyday voluntary actions. Voluntary action is a complex form of action that involves both unconscious and conscious component processes. This chapter reviews the unconscious components of voluntary action and then examines how these components interact with consciousness. The analysis includes treatments of Skinner’s influential “three-term contingency” and the phenomenon of effortless control. The chapter discusses the unresolved issues and paradoxes that are encountered when investigating action from a reductionistic standpoint in which there is no homunculus-like agent involved in voluntary action.

Can one be fooled into believing that one intended an action that one in fact did not intend? Past experimental paradigms have demonstrated that participants, when provided with false perceptual feedback about their actions, can be fooled into misperceiving the nature of their intended motor act. However, because veridical proprioceptive/perceptual feedback limits the extent to which participants can be fooled, few studies have been able to answer our question and induce the illusion to intend. In a novel paradigm addressing this question, participants were instructed to move a line on the computer screen by use of a phony brain–computer interface. Line movements were actually controlled by computer program. Demonstrating the illusion to intend, participants reported more intentions to move the line when it moved frequently than when it moved infrequently. Consistent with ideomotor theory, the finding illuminates the intimate liaisons among ideomotor processing, the sense of agency, and action production

What is the primary function of consciousness in the nervous system? The answer to this question remains enigmatic, not so much because of a lack of relevant data, but because of the lack of a conceptual framework with which to interpret the data. To this end, we have developed Passive Frame Theory, an internally coherent framework that, from an action-based perspective, synthesizes empirically supported hypotheses from diverse fields of investigation. The theory proposes that the primary function of consciousness is well-circumscribed, serving the 'somatic nervous system[. For this system, consciousness serves as a frame that constrains and directs skeletal muscle output, thereby yielding adaptive behavior. The mechanism by which consciousness achieves this is more counterintuitive, passive, and “low level” than the kinds of functions that theorists have previously attributed to consciousness. Passive frame theory begins to illuminate (a) what consciousness contributes to nervous function, (b) how consciousness achieves this function, and (c) the neuroanatomical substrates of conscious processes. Our untraditional, action-based perspective focuses on olfaction instead of on vision and is 'descriptive' (describing the products of nature as they evolved to be) rather than 'normative' (construing processes in terms of how they should function). Passive frame theory begins to isolate the neuroanatomical, cognitive-mechanistic, and representational (e.g., conscious contents) processes associated with consciousness.

The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research.

Although it is well accepted that working memory is intimately related to consciousness, little research has illuminated the liaison between the two phenomena. To investigate this under-explored nexus, we used an imagery monitoring task to investigate the subjective aspects of WM performance. Specifically, in two experiments, we examined the effects on consciousness of holding in mind information having a low versus high memory load, and holding memoranda in mind during the presentation of distractors . Higher rates of rehearsal occurred in the high load and distractor conditions than in comparable control conditions. Examination of the temporal properties of the rehearsal-based imagery revealed that, across subjects, imagery events occurred evenly throughout the delay. We hope that future variants of this new imagery monitoring task will reveal additional insights about WM, consciousness, and action control