Abstract Human perception and action are tailored to the situation at hand, and thus reflect the current intentions of the perceiver/actor. We suggest that this is achieved by an ''intentional-weighting'' mechanism. It operates on the cognitive representations of the features of perceived events and produced event-perceptions and actions that is. Intention-or goal-related feature dimensions are weighted more strongly, so that feature values defined on the respective dimension have a stronger impact on information processing, and stimulus and response selection in particular. This article discusses what intentional weighting is, how such a mechanism may work, and how it relates to available research on attention, action planning, and executive control. In everyday life all kinds of behavior are performed seemingly seamlessly. We are able to plan and execute an enormous variety of actions, such as visiting a friend for having a cup of coffee. This involves arranging transportation to get to your friend's place, paying attention to traffic on your way over, controlling your motor system to move the cup of coffee to your mouth, and so on. We constantly need to adjust our intended actions to the situation at hand. That is, in our intended action to go over to our friend's house we need to take into consideration the constantly changing traffic situation in order not to get into an accident. In our intended action to drink coffee we need to adjust our arm and hand position in such a way that enables us to grasp the cup and bring it to our mouth. This flexibility to adjust to the situational context requires some kind of cognitive-control mechanism. Cognitive control pertains to input as well as to output. That is, we need a control mechanism to select those perceptual events that are important to us and we need a control mechanism to select the actions we want to perform. Since Donders' (1869) seminal studies, cognitive control is commonly considered to operate online by intervening between stimulus-driven processes and the production of actions (Monsell & Driver, 2000; Norman & Shallice, 1986; Posner & Snyder, 1975; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977) . Accordingly, researchers assume that attentional mechanisms take care of the available stimulus information by prioritizing relevant over irrelevant stimuli were stimulus features, whereas response-selection mechanisms make sure that the most appropriate action is being selected. However, as elaborated elsewhere (Hommel, 2002 (Hommel, , 2009 , online control mechanisms often operate automatically in the sense that the outcome of their operation can be predicted on the basis of the stimulus being presented in the instructions given to the subject. This means that the true control operations-the processes responsible for cognitive adaptations and flexibility-take place before the first stimulus is being presented and the first response being selected. In other words, the control of input and output control must rely on off-line operations and it is these operations the present article is dealing with. As we will argue, preparing for a task is associated with specific processes that are configuring the cognitive system and the available representations of stimuli and responses in such a way that online control operations can run off
Indeed, the effect of task goals on the interaction between perception and action in this study can be ascribed to the basic principle of intentional weighting REF .
Intentional weighting: a basic principle in cognitive control
Psychological Research
Psychological Research
Psychology Medicine