Mechanisms for the generation and regulation of sequential behaviour

A critical aspect of much human behaviour is the generation and regulation of sequential activities. Such behaviour is seen in both naturalistic settings such as routine action and language production and laboratory tasks such as serial recall and many reaction time experiments. There are a variety of computational mechanisms that may support the generation and regulation of sequential behaviours, ranging from those underlying Turing machines to those employed by recurrent connectionist networks. This paper surveys a range of such mechanisms, together with a range of empirical phenomena related to human sequential behaviour. It is argued that the empirical phenomena pose difficulties for most sequencing mechanisms, but that converging evidence from behavioural flexibility, error data arising from when the system is stressed or when it is damaged following brain injury, and between-trial effects in reaction time tasks, point to a hybrid symbolic activation-based mechanism for the generation and regulation of sequential behaviour. Some implications of this view for the nature of mental computation are highlighted

Cognitive control in the generation of random sequences: a computational study of secondary task effects

Cognitive control processes, such as those involved in response inhibition or task switching, have been the focus of much recent research. Few studies, however, have considered how such processes work together in tasks that require multiple control processes. This paper reports a computational study of random sequence generation and the cognitive control processes involved therein. The task, which is argued to involve multiple control processes, produces several dependent measures. These measures are held to be differentially dependent on the differential efficacy of the various underlying control processes. Initial simulations demonstrate that the model is capable of reproducing subject performance on the basic task. Additional simulations explore differential interference effects of different secondary tasks (held to interfere with different control processes) on the different random generation dependent measures. The work illustrates how the putative control processes may interact in the production of successive responses during the random generation task

Tool use and related errors in ideational apraxia: The quantitative simulation of patient error profiles

The behaviour of ideational apraxic patients on simple tasks involving multiple objects is typically marked by a variety of errors. While some of these errors concern the sequential organisation of action through time, many relate to the misuse of, or failure to use, necessary or appropriate tools. In this paper we apply the computational model of Cooper & Shallice (2000) to five standard multiple object tasks used in clinical assessment and demonstrate how, when lesioned, the model can account for the error profiles of two ideational apraxic patients discussed by Rumiati et al. (2001). Application of the model to the multiple object tasks demonstrates the generality of the model, while the account of the error profiles extends previous work (Cooper et al., 2005) in which ideational apraxia was argued to arise from a generalised disturbance of object representations that are held to trigger action schemas

Order and disorder in everyday action: the roles of contention scheduling and supervisory attention

This paper describes the contention scheduling/supervisory attentional system approach to action selection and uses this account to structure a survey of current theories of the control of action. The focus is on how such theories account for the types of error produced by some patients with frontal and/or left temporoparietal damage when attempting everyday tasks. Four issues, concerning both the theories and their accounts of everyday action breakdown, emerge: first, whether multiple control systems, each capable of controlling action in different situations, exist; second, whether different forms of damage at the neural level result in conceptually distinct disorders; third, whether semantic/conceptual knowledge of objects and actions can be dissociated from control mechanisms, and if so what computational principles govern sequential control; and fourth, whether disorders of everyday action should be attributed to a loss of semantic/conceptual knowledge, a malfunction of control, or some combination of the two

Express: a web-based technology to support human and computational experimentation

Experimental cognitive psychology has been greatly assisted by the development of general computer-based experiment presentation packages. Typically, however, such packages provide little support for running participants on different computers. It is left to the experimenter to ensure that group sizes are balanced between conditions and to merge data gathered on different computers once the experiment is complete. Equivalent issues arise in the evaluation of parameterized computational models, where it is frequently necessary to test a model's behavior over a range of parameter values (which amount to between-subjects factors) and where such testing can be speeded up significantly by the use of multiple processors. This article describes Express, a Web-based technology for coordinating "clients" (human participants or computational models) and collating client data. The technology provides an experiment design editor, client coordination facilities (e.g., automated randomized assignment of clients to groups so that group sizes are balanced), general data collation and tabulation facilities, a range of basic statistical functions (which are constrained by the specified experimental design), and facilities to export data to standard statistical packages (such as SPSS). We report case studies demonstrating the utility of Express in both human and computational experiments. Express may be freely downloaded from the Express Web site (http://express.psyc.bbk.ac.uk/)

One parameter family of Compacton Solutions in a class of Generalized Korteweg-DeVries Equations

We study the generalized Korteweg-DeVries equations derivable from the Lagrangian: $L(l,p) = \int \left( \frac{1}{2} \varphi_{x} \varphi_{t} - { {(\varphi_{x})^{l}} \over {l(l-1)}} + \alpha(\varphi_{x})^{p} (\varphi_{xx})^{2} \right) dx,$ where the usual fields $u(x,t)$ of the generalized KdV equation are defined by $u(x,t) = \varphi_{x}(x,t)$. For $p$ an arbitrary continuous parameter $0< p \leq 2 ,l=p+2$ we find compacton solutions to these equations which have the feature that their width is independent of the amplitude. This generalizes previous results which considered $p=1,2$. For the exact compactons we find a relation between the energy, mass and velocity of the solitons. We show that this relationship can also be obtained using a variational method based on the principle of least action.Comment: Latex 4 pages and one figure available on reques