scholarly journals Planning and Representing Intentional Action

2003 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 593-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Hommel

This paper reviews recent approaches to human action planning and the cognitive representation of intentional actions. Evidence suggests that action planning takes place in terms of anticipated features of the intended goal, that is, in terms of action effects. These effects are acquired from early infancy on by registering contingencies between movements and perceptual movement outcomes. Co-occurrence of movements and effects leads to the creation of bidirectional associations between the underlying internal codes, thus establishing distributed perception-action networks subserving both perceiving external events and intentionally producing them. Action plans determine only the general, goal-relevant features of intended actions, while the fine-tuning is left to on-line sensory-motor processing. Action plans emerge from competition for action control between several factors: overlearned habits, perceptual events, and emotional influences, among others. Accordingly, action control represents a balance between personal intentions and wishes on the one hand and environmental affordances and demands on the other.

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-274
Author(s):  
Suzanne Meenan ◽  
Roger Lindsay

The human brain has a remarkable ability to generate plans for sequences of actions that allow human agents to co-operate with and to manipulate the behaviour of others. It is widely claimed that the operations underlying plan developments, behaviour sequencing and inhibition of inappropriate responses to the environment are carried out in the prefrontal cortex. This implies that the prefrontal cortex is a natural system with the capacity to utilise cognitive technology. The present paper argues that social competence is a manifestation of action planning in which other agents feature as plan elements. Accordingly, plans that involve other agents are expected to be more complex than plans which do not. In the light of evidence that negative information makes particularly heavy processing demands, social judgements involving prohibition or unacceptability are expected to create most difficulty for the human action planning system. These assumptions were tested by measuring the ability of patients with prefrontal injuries to detect anomalous action sequences, using a specially constructed Action Acceptability Test. It was hypothesised that if the frontal lobes play a major role in action planning, patients with frontal lobe injuries should show impaired ability to detect faulty action plans, particularly when such plans relate to complex social action sequences, and action sequences involving unacceptable behaviours. The hypotheses were generally supported as frontal-injury patients proved to be worse at detecting both complex social sequences and deviant action sequences than participants with non-frontal injuries and normal control participants. The results of the study are consistent with the view that human social competence results from the cognitive processes associated with action planning and the data also supports the claim that action planning processes are specifically disrupted by damage to the prefrontal cortex. The findings provide some confirmation for the Cognitive Technology perspective, in that action planning does seem to be physically associated with a specific brain area, and including social agents and deviations from acceptability in action plans do seem to be manipulations that operate to make action plans more difficult to process, hence causing more errors in individuals with damage to the prefrontal cortex. The results also provide some encouragement for the belief that new cognitive tools can be constructed that link brain processes to other levels of description, such as social behaviour. The Action Acceptability Test, a prognostic tool developed to predict the social competence of frontal-injury patients, is offered as one such example.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
K Sørensen ◽  
A Koylyu ◽  
B Mikkelsen

Abstract Background Grounded in the last decade's health literacy developments; the work of the European health literacy action networks on measurement and NCDs as well as the newly adopted European Health Literacy Roadmap and resolution agreed upon by their 53 Member States in 2019, the WHO European Region continues its investment in health literacy. A WHO European health literacy action plan is under development to be launched in 2021. The action plan implies concrete actions for Member States on how to develop health literate populations and societies. Methods Based on co-creation principles, the development of the action plan is conducted by stakeholders from a wide range of fields and disciplines. Lead by the WHO European Regional Office, the process includes an initial stakeholder meeting, iterative technical consultations with experts and the wider stakeholder community and Member State consultations. The analytical methods integrate a SWOT-analysis, future scenario thinking and long-sight action planning approaches as well as application of health literacy analytics. Results The results of the initial analytical steps will be presented such as the SWOT analysis, the future scenarios and associated recommendations on how to create health literate populations and societies in Europe. Additionally, the outline of the draft of the European health literacy action plan will be open for discussion and input. Conclusions Through an iterative process, the European health literacy action plan is co-produced by multiple actors through a series of consultations facilitating ownership and accountability. The European health literacy action plan can be an inspiration and a model for other world regions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (03) ◽  
pp. 401-429
Author(s):  
Ahlam DARAWSHEH ◽  
Nadia GHALIA

Addressing motivation as a triggering and supportive factor of educational activity emphasizes the importance of quality of information, learning experience, mediated learning, or positive attitude towards the act of knowledge in achieving school performance. According to the generally accepted conception, following the consultation of the specialized literature regarding the approach of the motivational phenomenon, we can say that motivation lies at the basis of the good functioning of human action components, regardless of the activity or tacquisition level of the one who makes the effort to achieve it.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-65
Author(s):  
Marcelo Romero ◽  
◽  
Matheus Gutoski ◽  
Leandro Takeshi Hattori ◽  
Manassés Ribeiro ◽  
...  

Transfer learning is a paradigm that consists in training and testing classifiers with datasets drawn from distinct distributions. This technique allows to solve a particular problem using a model that was trained for another purpose. In the recent years, this practice has become very popular due to the increase of public available pre-trained models that can be fine-tuned to be applied in different scenarios. However, the relationship between the datasets used for training the model and the test data is usually not addressed, specially where the fine-tuning process is done only for the fully connected layers of a Convolutional Neural Network with pre-trained weights. This work presents a study regarding the relationship between the datasets used in a transfer learning process in terms of the performance achieved by models complexities and similarities. For this purpose, we fine-tune the final layer of Convolutional Neural Networks with pre-trained weights using diverse soft biometrics datasets. An evaluation of the performances of the models, when tested with datasets that are different from the one used for training the model, is presented. Complexity and similarity metrics are also used to perform the evaluation.


Author(s):  
Hartwig Steusloff ◽  
Michael Decker

Extremely complex systems like the smart grid or autonomous cars need to meet society's high expectations regarding their safe operation. The human designer and operator becomes a “system component” as soon as responsible decision making is needed. Tacit knowledge and other human properties are of crucial relevance for situation-dependent decisions. The uniform modeling of technical systems and humans will benefit from ethical reflection. In this chapter, we describe human action with technical means and ask, on the one hand, for a comprehensive multidisciplinary technology assessment in order to produce supporting knowledge and methods for technical and societal decision making. On the other hand—and here is the focus—we propose a system life cycle approach which integrates the human in the loop and argue that it can be worthwhile to describe humans in a technical way in order to implement human decision making by means of the use case method. Ethical reflection and even ethically based technical decision making can support the effective control of convergent technology systems.


Author(s):  
Marco Orru

Émile Durkheim is generally recognized to be one of the founders of sociology as a distinct scientific discipline. Trained as a philosopher, Durkheim identified the central theme of sociology as the emergence and persistence of morality and social solidarity (along with their pathologies) in modern and traditional human societies. His distinctive approach to sociology was to adopt the positivistic method in identifying and explaining social facts – the facts of the moral life. Sociology was to be, in Durkheim’s own words, a science of ethics. Durkheim’s sociology combined a positivistic methodology of research with an idealistic theory of social solidarity. On the one hand, Durkheim forcefully claimed that the empirical observation and analysis of regularities in the social world must be the starting point of the sociological enterprise; on the other hand, he was equally emphatic in claiming that sociological investigation must deal with the ultimate ends of human action – the moral values and goals that guide human conduct and create the essential conditions for social solidarity. Accordingly, in his scholarly writings on the division of labour, on suicide, on education, and on religion, Durkheim sought to identify through empirical evidence the major sources of social solidarity and of the social pathologies that undermine it.


1983 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
J. G. Kotzé

An innovative orientation is a highly desirable characteristic of senior-middle and top management teams in business organizations. The formalized expression of such entrepreneurial flair may be developed in the form of action plans. Such plans consist of five elements, of which one, namely the financial component, is of prime importance. Three categories of action plans are distinguished and the evaluation of the anticipated financial impact of action plans within each category discussed. Finally, the integration of the anticipated financial results of action plans in the formal long- and short-term plans of an organization is described.


2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 891-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilfried Kunde

This commentary focuses on Hommel et al.'s inferences on action planning. It discusses the relevance of anticipated extrinsic movement effects for action control, the problems of a feature-based representation of actions, and the necessity of the acquisition of conditional movement-effect associations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-50
Author(s):  
Michael Baris

Abstract The rabbis portray two arenas in which Torah is studied. Above the terrestrial academy of the sages, the Rabbis posit a transcendent, celestial yeshiva. This dual system seems central to the rabbinic doctrine of retribution in a sequential afterlife. In contrast to the standard dualist reading and accepted dogma, I propose a monist’s reading of these aggadic texts, which sees a single arena of human action and endeavor, with multivalent significance. My starting point is the dramatic narrative of the persecution, flight, and ultimate death of one of the leading Talmudic sages, Rabba bar Naḥmani. These esoteric stories go beyond familiar taxonomies as modes of concealment. Not cyphers to be cracked, they offer a nuanced way of thinking about the world, accessible through narrative as an adaptive mode of transmission.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 815-815
Author(s):  
Yoshiaki Kawata ◽  

The 2011 Great East Japan earthquake has shown all too clearly that disaster management and mitigation measures seen from the viewpoint of protecting society are not sufficient for addressing a national crisis such as the projected Nankai Trough earthquake or Tokyo inland earthquake whose damage is expected to exceed the present estimated damage. Our study explores the weakness against disasters in how modern Japanese society uses “reverse thinking” in which investigates studying how large-scale disasters may adversely affect society and increase damage effectively. This process profiles the worst disaster scenarios that could conceivably lead to a national crisis. Classifying these worst scenarios, we suggest policies to the problems that are common to many scenarios, and we present action plans for individual problems. First, we conduct workshops for identifying damage magnification factors and evaluating their importance under the categories of human damage, property damage, and damage to social functions, unifying the awareness of research organization. Second, we have researchers on 1) mortality, 2) tsunami inundation, 3) liquefaction, 4) capital function, 5) evacuation, 6) required assistance, 7) lifelines, 8) high buildings, 9) information networks, 10) government systems, and 11) economic systems analyze damage magnification conditions due to hazard, vulnerability and measure aspects. Third, we sort potential final consequences and separate them based on commonality, and propose new policies and concrete action plans for preventing the occurrence of worst-case scenarios. This research is expected to give new paradigms in disaster management science and new ways of policy making and action planning that will minimize the undesirable consequences of catastrophic earthquake and tsunami and yield new knowledge on disaster processes and damage magnification scenarios. Most importantly, we conclude that it is necessary to have a new Japanese governmental organization, such as a Ministry of Disaster Resilience or a Disaster Resilience Management Agency, handle these national crises.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document