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Psychological Research (2009) 73:512526 DOI 10.1007/s00426-009-0234-2
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Action control according to TEC (theory of event coding)
Bernhard Hommel
Received: 19 September 2008 / Accepted: 27 February 2009 / Published online: 1 April 2009 The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract The theory of event coding (TEC) is a general framework explaining how perceived and produced events (stimuli and responses) are cognitively represented and how their representations interact to generate perception and action. This article discusses the implications of TEC for understanding the control of voluntary action and makes an attempt to apply, specify, and concretize the basic theoretical ideas in the light of the available research on action control. In particular, it is argued that the major control operations may take place long before a stimulus is encountered (the prepared-reXex principle), that stimulus-response translation may be more automatic than commonly thought, that action selection and execution are more interwoven than most approaches allow, and that the acquisition of action-contingent events (action eVects) is likely to sub-serve both the selection and the evaluation of actions.
Life inside and outside of psychological laboratories diVers in many ways, which is particularly true with respect to action control. Outside the lab people seem to carry out actions to achieve particular goals and to adapt the environment according to their needs. Once they enter a lab, however, they are commonly talked into responding to arbitrary stimuli by carrying out meaningless movements. The latter is assumed to increase the amount of experimental control over the variables involved in performing an action, which of course is true and utterly important for disentangling all the confounds present in everyday actions. And yet, most models of action control seem to take this highly artiWcial
stimulus-response situation so serious that they use it as a template for voluntary action in general. In fact, almost all introductory textbooks of cognitive psychology do not only neglect most aspects of action control, but they also reduce action to a mere byproduct of perception and reasoning.
We could have seen this coming. In the last half of the nineteenth century there were two dominant forces that shaped psychological theorizing with regard to action control. On the one hand, there were authors who...