ArticlePsychological research2022
GOALIATH: a theory of goal-directed behavior.
Article in Psychological research, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Adult hippocampal neurogenesis shapes ideomotor action control in mice.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Short-term action-effect bindings encode perceptual transitions rather than perceptual end-states.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Maturational Changes in Action-Effect Integration Processes Are Reflected by Changes in the Directed Cortical Network Communication.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Goals rather than predictions determine the sense of agency.iScience · 2025Article
- Improving the provision of clinical pharmacy services in low- and middle-income countries: a qualitative study in tertiary health facilities in Tanzania.BMJ public health · 2025Article
- How a co-actor's (Un-) reliability modulates goal selection in a novel joint goal-setting paradigm.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Exorcizing the homunculus from ideomotor/simulation theory: a commentary on Bach et al. (2022), Frank et al. (2023), and Rieger et al. (2023).Psychological research · 2024Review
- A differential impact of action-effect temporal contiguity on different measures of response inhibition in the Go\No-Go and Stop-signal paradigms.Psychological research · 2024Article
- C-SMB 2.0: Integrating over 25 years of motor sequencing research with the Discrete Sequence Production task.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- The Role of Stimulus Uncertainty and Curiosity in Attention Control.Experimental psychology · 2024Article
- Factors associated with intention of clinical pharmacists and candidates to provide pharmaceutical care: application of theory planned behaviour.BMC medical education · 2023Observational
- Having multiple selves helps learning agents explore and adapt in complex changing worlds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The contribution of the basal ganglia and cerebellum to motor learning: A neuro-computational approach.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Measuring task structure with transitional response times: Task representations are more than task sets.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- A Participatory Sensing Study to Understand the Problems Older Adults Faced in Developing Medication-Taking Habits.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Dissociating the Neural Correlates of Planning and Executing Tasks with Nested Task Sets.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Psychometric properties and measurement invariance across gender of the Italian version of the tempest self-regulation questionnaire for eating adapted for young adults.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- You have to let go sometimes: advances in understanding goal disengagement.Motivation and emotion · 2022Article
- The Control of Event-File Management.Journal of cognition · 2022Review
- Towards an Ideology-Free, Truly Mechanistic Health Psychology.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
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Abstract
Commonsense and theorizing about action control agree in assuming that human behavior is (mainly) driven by goals, but no mechanistic theory of what goals are, where they come from, and how they impact action selection is available. Here I develop such a theory that is based on the assumption that GOALs guide Intentional Actions THrough criteria (GOALIATH). The theory is intended to be minimalist and parsimonious with respect to its assumptions, as transparent and mechanistic as possible, and it is based on representational assumptions provided by the Theory of Event Coding (TEC). It holds that goal-directed behavior is guided by selection criteria that activate and create competition between event files that contain action-effect codes matching one or more of the criteria-a competition that eventually settles into a solution favoring the best-matching event file. The criteria are associated with various sources, including biological drives, acquired needs (e.g., of achievement, power, or affiliation), and short-term, sometimes arbitrary, instructed aims. Action selection is, thus, a compromise that tries to satisfy various criteria related to different driving forces, which are also likely to vary in strength over time. Hence, what looks like goal-directed action emerges from, and represents an attempt to satisfy multiple constraints with different origins, purposes, operational characteristics, and timescales-which among other things does not guarantee a high degree of coherence or rationality of the eventual outcome. GOALIATH calls for a radical break with conventional theorizing about the control of goal-directed behavior, as it among other things questions existing cognitive-control theories and dual-route models of action control.
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