On the representation of intentions: Do personally relevant consequences determine activation?

Abstract

The intention-superiority effect describes shorter latencies for reactions to stimuli intended for future enactment, relative to stimuli associated with no enactment or canceled enactment. Previous attempts to demonstrate an intention-superiority effect for other types of tasks-for instance, observing the experimenter executing actionshave not yielded an intention-superiority effect. A reason for this could be that the typical enactment task was associated with a higher degree of personal relevance than were other laboratory-based tasks and that task importance or its consequences heighten the accessibility of intentionrelevant materials. In two experiments, we demonstrate an intention-superiority effect for different types of tasks (e.g., monitoring a video clip) when task realization has personally relevant consequences in terms of a performance evaluation. In contrast, we found no intention-superiority effect when future enactment had no personally relevant consequences for participants. These findings imply that the intention-superiority effect is not restricted to actions but occurs generally for relevant plans.

Tuned for the future: Intentions are only accessible when a retrieval opportunity is near

“…Reaction times for the correctly recognized stimuli from the intention-related and control list were analyzed in a 2 (retrieval context) × 2 (performance task) × 2 (list) mixed ANOVA. In line with the results of a previous study (Schult & Steffens, 2011), no effects involving the factor Performance Task were significant, all Fs < 1.3. We did find a main effect of list, F(1, 44) = 4.64, R 2 p = .10, and this effect was qualified by a List × Retrieval Opportunity interaction, F(1, 44) = 9.03, R 2 p = .17 (see Fig.…”

“…All participants were told that the experimenter would evaluate their performance in the respective task. In line with our previous findings, we predicted that we would observe an intention-superiority effect independent of the type of task (enactment or monitoring) because participants expected to face an evaluation of their outcome (Schult & Steffens, 2011).…”

“…In line with this reasoning, they reported an intention-superiority effect for verbs that participants intended to enact, but no effect if participants intended to verbally report the verbs. In contrast to a motor-code hypothesis, we provided some evidence that the intentionsuperiority effect may reflect a more general phenomenon of the heightened accessibility of personally relevant intentions, be they related to the future execution of actions or not (Schult & Steffens, 2011). We found an intentionsuperiority effect in a lexical-decision task for different types of postponed tasks that did not necessarily involve a motor response (e.g., giving a grade for a written recall test), provided that the quality of the task performance was personally relevant for participants.…”

“…Goschke and Kuhl (1993) labeled this reaction-time advantage the intention-superiority effect. The intention-superiority effect has been replicated in a lexicaldecision task (e.g., Dockree & Ellis, 2001;Marsh et al, 1998;Marsh, Hicks, & Bryan, 1999;Penningroth, 2011;Schult & Steffens, 2011) and in more naturalistic settings (Dockree & Ellis, 2001).…”

“…3;Goschke & Kuhl, 1993, Exps. 1 and 2;Marsh et al, 1998;Marsh et al, 1999;Penningroth, 2011;Schult & Steffens, 2011) or after a short filler task (Freeman & Ellis, 2003, Exp. 4;Goschke & Kuhl, 1993, Exp.…”