title: Abstract structural representations of goal-directed behavior.
abstract: Linguistic theory holds that the structure of a sentence can be described in abstract syntactic terms, independent of the specific words the sentence contains. Nonlinguistic behavior, including goal-directed action, is also theorized to have an underlying structural, or "syntactic," organization. We propose that purposive action sequences are represented cognitively in terms of a means-ends parse, which is a formal specification of how actions fit together to accomplish desired outcomes. To test this theory, we leveraged the phenomenon of structural priming in two experiments. As predicted, participants read sentences describing action sequences faster when these sentences were presented amid other sentences sharing the same parse. Results from a second experiment indicate that the underlying representations relevant to observed action sequences are not strictly tied to language processing. Our results suggest that the structure of goal-directed behavior may be represented abstractly, independently of specific actions and goals, just as linguistic syntax is thought to stand independent of other levels of representation.
authors.affiliation: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Kachina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Allen
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ibara
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Seymour
authors.forename: Natalia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Cordova
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Botvinick
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D032882:Comprehension; D003210:Concept Formation; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014741:Video Recording; D055815:Young Adult