Wolfgang Prinz

Die wissenschaftliche Psychologie ist von der Alltagsverwendung des Begriffes „Psychologie“ abzugrenzen. Die wissenschaftliche Psychologie gliedert sich in verschiedene Teildisziplinen. Eine wesentliche und grundlegende Teildisziplin ist die Allgemeine Psychologie. Sie ist zum einen durch Universalismus gekennzeichnet, d. h., sie fragt nach dem, was Menschen gemein haben, und zum anderen durch Funktionalismus, d. h., sie beschäftigt sich mit Prozessen und Mechanismen psychischer Vorgänge des Erlebens und des Verhaltens (dem Wie) und weniger mit deren Inhalten (dem Was). Da die Allgemeine Psychologie die kausale Mechanik psychischer Vorgänge erfassen will, ist ihre hauptsächliche Forschungsmethode das Experiment. Theorien in der Allgemeinen Psychologie gehen oft von abstrakten Prozessen der Informationsverarbeitung aus, die im Gehirn als informationsverarbeitendes System implementiert sind. Erleben und Verhalten sind Ergebnisse der informationsverarbeitenden Prozesse.

An action-oriented perspective changes the role of an individual from a passive observer to an actively engaged agent interacting in a closed loop with the world as well as with others. Cognition exists to serve action within a landscape that contains both. This chapter surveys this landscape and addresses the status of the pragmatic turn. Its potential influence on science and the study of cognition are considered (including perception, social cognition, social interaction, sensorimotor entrainment, and language acquisition) and its impact on how neuroscience is studied is also investigated (with the notion that brains do not passively build models, but instead support the guidance of action). A review of its implications in robotics and engineering includes a discussion of the application of enactive control principles to couple action and perception in robotics as well as the conceptualization of system design in a more holistic, less modular manner. Practical applications that can impact the human condition are reviewed (e.g., educational applications, treatment possibilities for developmental and psychopathological disorders, the development of neural prostheses). All of this foreshadows the potential societal implications of the pragmatic turn. The chapter concludes that an action-oriented approach emphasizes a continuum of interaction between technical aspects of cognitive systems and robotics, biology, psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities, where the individual is part of a grounded cultural system.

Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists examine the will and its pathologies from theoretical and empirical perspectives, offering a conceptual overview and discussing schizophrenia, depression, prefrontal lobe damage, and substance abuse as disorders of volition. Science tries to understand human action from two perspectives, the cognitive and the volitional. The volitional approach, in contrast to the more dominant "outside-in" studies of cognition, looks at actions from the inside out, examining how actions are formed and informed by internal conditions. In Disorders of Volition, scholars from a range of disciplines seek to advance our understanding of the processes supporting voluntary action by addressing conditions in which the will is impaired. Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists examine the will and its pathologies from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, offering a conceptual overview and discussing specific neurological and psychiatric conditions as disorders of volition. After presenting different conceptual frameworks that identify agency, decision making, and goal pursuit as central components of volition, the book examines how impairments in these and other aspects of volition manifest themselves in schizophrenia, depression, prefrontal lobe damage, and substance abuse. Contributors George Ainslie, Tim Bayne, Antoine Bechara, Paul W. Burgess, Anna-Lisa Cohen, Daniel Dennett, Stéphanie Dubal, Philippe Fossati, Chris Frith, Sam J. Gilbert, Peter Gollwitzer, Jordan Grafman, Patrick Haggard, Jay G. Hull, Marc Jeannerod, Roland Jouvent, Frank Krueger, Neil Levy, Peter F. Liddle, Kristen L. Mackiewitz, Thomas Metzinger, Jack B. Nitschke, Jiro Okuda, Adrian M. Owen, Chris Parry, Wolfgang Prinz, Joëlle Proust, Michael A. Sayette, Werner X. Schneider, Natalie Sebanz, Jon S. Simons, Laurie B. Slone, Sean A. Spence

Developmental psychologists assume that infants understand other persons’ actions after and because they understand their own. However, there is another possibility as well, namely that infants come to understand their own actions after and because they understand other persons’ actions. We reviewed infant research on the influence of perceived actions on self-performed actions as well as the reverse. Furthermore, we investigated the interplay between both aspects of action understanding by means of a sequence variation. The results show the impact of agentive experience for action understanding, but not the reverse. The question whether infants’ perceived and to-be-produced actions share common representations of the perceptual and the motor system is discussed in relation to its implications for the social making of minds.

This paper outlines a representational framework for an import theory of selfhood and consciousness. Import theory posits that selfhood and consciousness are first perceived and understood in others and then imported from others to self. The theory raises three major claims: conscious awareness builds on self-representation; selfhood is a social, not a natural, kind; selfhood is imported from others to self. The paper focuses on the third claim and discusses mechanisms for import from others to self. While export theories offer a number of mechanisms to account for the putative transition from self to others, import theories have so far not much to offer for the putative transition in the reverse direction. A framework is outlined to close this gap. Key to the framework is the notion of action matching. This term addresses dyadic interactions for perception/action matching, that is, matching perception of foreign action to production of own action, and vice versa. The framework specifies both representational resources and social practices on which self-import through action matching is claimed to rely. A final commentary compares export and import theories in terms of explanatory power, claiming that import theories can explain key features of consciousness that export theories can only invoke.

A hypothetical evolutionary scenario is offered meant to account for the emergence of mental selves. According to the scenario, mental selves are constructed to solve a source-attribution problem. They emerge when internally generated mental contents are treated like messages arising from external personal sources. As a result, mental contents becomes attributed to the self as an internal personal source. According to this view, subjectivity is construed outward-in, that is, one's own mental self is derived from, and is secondary to, the mental selves perceived in others. The social construction of subjectivity and selfhood relies on, and is maintained in, various discourses on subjectivity

Traditional approaches to human information processing tend to deal with perception and action planning in isolation, so that an adequate account of the perception-action interface is still missing. On the perceptual side, the dominant cognitive view largely underestimates, and thus fails to account for, the impact of action-related processes on both the processing of perceptual information and on perceptual learning. On the action side, most approaches conceive of action planning as a mere continuation of stimulus processing, thus failing to account for the goal-directedness of even the simplest reaction in an experimental task. We propose a new framework for a more adequate theoretical treatment of perception and action planning, in which perceptual contents and action plans are coded in a common representational medium by feature codes with distal reference. Perceived events (perceptions) and to-be-produced events (actions) are equally represented by integrated, task-tuned networks of feature codes – cognitive structures we call event codes. We give an overview of evidence from a wide variety of empirical domains, such as spatial stimulus-response compatibility, sensorimotor synchronization, and ideomotor action, showing that our main assumptions are well supported by the data. Key Words: action planning; binding; common coding; event coding; feature integration; perception; perception-action interface.