Body movement provides a rich source of cues about other people's goals and intentions. In the present research, we investigate how well people can distinguish between different social intentions on the basis of movement information. Participants observed a model reaching toward and grasping a wooden block with the intent to cooperate with a…

Children are ubiquitous imitators, but how do they decide which actions to imitate? One possibility is that children rationally combine multiple sources of information about which actions are necessary to cause a particular outcome. For instance, children might learn from contingencies between action sequences and outcomes across repeated…

After a long period of neglect, the phenomenology of action has recently regained its place in the agenda of philosophers and scientists alike. The recent explosion of interest in the topic highlights its complexity. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework allowing for a more precise characterization of the many facets of…

In three experiments we investigated how people determine whether or not they are in control of sounds they hear. The sounds were either triggered by participants' taps or controlled by a computer. The task was to distinguish between self-control and external control during active tapping, and during passive listening to a playback of the sounds…

Unconscious perception is commonly described as a phenomenon that is not under intentional control and relies on automatic processes. We challenge this view by arguing that some automatic processes may indeed be under intentional control, which is implemented in task-sets that define how the task is to be performed. In consequence, those prime…

The ability to understand that goals and other intentional relations are attributes of individual people is of fundamental importance to social life. It enables us to predict and interpret actions on-line by relating a person's prior and current behaviors, and distinguishing them from the behaviors of other persons. In this paper, we consider the…

Argues that accounting for introspection within a theory of consciousness can be achieved through constructing information- processing models that account for "Type-C" processes in which awareness of the stimulus is necessary for an intentional action. Suggests that the Shallice (1988) framework provides an initial account of Type-C…