British Journal of Psychology (2001), 92, 113–128 Printed in Great Britain 113

© 2001 The British Psychological Society

The psychology of action

Patrick Haggard*
University College London, UK

Actions are part of the way that the mind controls the body. Two fundamental
psychological questions about actions are ‘Where do they come from?’ and ‘How
does the mind produce them?’ These may be called the ‘internal generation problem’
and the ‘information expansion problem’ respectively. The importance of these ques-
tions was appreciated at the birth of the British Psychological Society (BPS) a century
ago, though the experimental methods to study them were lacking. This article falls
into two halves. The Žrst half discusses some of the major epochs in the psychology of
action over the last 100 years; the second half outlines some currently prominent
research questions, and considers their historical antecedents. Finally, I offer some
speculations regarding where future contributions to the psychology of action will be
most fruitful.

Actions are what our minds do to our bodies. There are several reasons why action is and
should be a central topic in scientiŽc psychology. First, psychology is often seen as the
study of behaviour, and all behaviour involves some kind of bodily movement. Secondly,
action requires considerable information-processing (albeit often unconscious), as attempts
to build intelligent robots have shown. For example, to lift a glass to my lips I need to
represent where the glass is, work out how to get my hand there, move it there smoothly
and efŽciently, enclose the glass without dropping it, and bring it into gentle contact with
my mouth, without either spilling the liquid or breaking my teeth. Thirdly, over half the
neurons in the brain are located in areas directly involved in the control of action. Fourthly,
the ability to control our bodies voluntarily is central to our sense of self: disorders which
interfere with the normal generation of voluntary action, such as paralysis and schizo-
phrenia, can have dramatic psychological consequences. This article aims therefore to
review the philosophical origins of the psychology of action, to describe the major theories
and lines of progress in the psychology of action during the 100 years of the BPS, to place
our understanding of action within the wider psychological context of the human mind as a
whole, and to suggest some possible directions for future advances.

Action and movement

An important Žrst step towards these aims is to clarify what an action is. Muscular
movement is a necessary but not a sufŽcient condition for action: if I do not move I have
not performed an action. It follows that thoughts alone are not sufŽcient for action:

* Requests for reprints should be addressed to Patrick Haggard, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of
Psychology, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK (e-mail: p.haggard@ucl.ac.uk).
114 Patrick Haggard

imagined movement, on this account, is not an action. Thus, the term ‘action’ implies
some psychological elements in addition to physical movement. One popular view is that
an action implies a goal (Prinz, 1997): we perform an action because we want to produce a
particular effect. In most psychological usage, action also implies a preceding intention:
typically, we want or intend to achieve a special goal, and this intention drives the
generation of action. The physiological concept of reex ‘action’, directly driven by a
peripheral stimulus, is therefore not a true action in this psychological sense. Both
traditions are deŽnitely psychological, because both have been concerned with the
information-processing through which the mind controls the body. Accordingly, both
traditions are discussed in this article.

Philosophical roots of the psychology of action

The psychology of action begins with the mind–body problem. How do our mental
states give rise to physical movements of our bodies? What mental operations allow us to
generate appropriate motor actions from our thoughts? These questions were clearly
articulated early in the development of psychology. The birth of psychology in the 19th
century arose from the application of experimental scientiŽc methods to traditional
philosophical problems. The dominant philosophical problem within action has been
that of free will. The free-will problem asks whether ‘I’ can choose what my body will do,
and how ‘I’ can make my body do it. These issues have been at the heart of metaphysics
since Descartes, and were particularly prominent in the German philosophical tradition,
beginning with Kant. The free-will problem is a psychophysical one, in that it concerns
the relation between the mind and the body.
At the time when the BPS was formed in 1901, this philosophical heritage ensured
that will and action were central topics in psychology, and were widely debated. Perhaps
the best example was the largely forgotten controversy over ‘conation’. In his seminal
article on psychology for the 1886 Encyclopaedia Brittanica, James Ward proposed three
major elements of mind: conative, cognitive and affective (Ward, 1886). Etymologically,
conation means trying, but the concept seems closest to the modern idea of intentional
action. Ward’s account of mind still had inuence in the mid-20th century, as the
reference in the accompanying article (Edgell, 1947/2001) shows. Later, in 1906, in
Vol. II of this journal, one of the great early British psychologists, G. F. Stout, also
considered action a central part of the mind–body problem (p. 1):
If we suppose (someone) to express his anger by intentionally striking someone whom he regards as an
enemy . . . there is not merely action in the sense in which it may take place in the material world:
there is interaction between the Subject as such and his Object as such.

‘Interaction between Subject and . . . Object’ encapsulates the central problem of how ‘I’
can act. Unsurprisingly, strictly empiricist psychology found these ideas difŽcult, to
Stout’s consternation (p. 11):
The prevailing view among experimental psychologists is distinctly adverse to the existence of any
peculiar kind of immediate experience distinctively characteristic of conation. What we have called
‘felt tendency’ (i.e., conation) seems to elude introspection as carried out under the test conditions of
the laboratory . . . Those psychologists . . . do not look for {conation} where alone it can be found, and
their failure to Žnd it is therefore not a sufŽcient reason for denying its existence.
 The psychology of action 115

Stout was accordingly pessimistic about the prevailing experimental methods’ ability
to explain intentional action. The paradigms of analytic experimental psychology
based on study of sensations were not appropriate for action. This inadequacy of the
experimental approach was, however, contingent rather than inevitable. Stout did not
rule out a successful experimental psychology of intentional action, though he was
clearly aware that it would not be as easy to achieve as a psychology of perception
(1906, p. 13):
{Experimental psychologists} have not expressly applied their peculiar methods to this special
problem. They have not, for instance, subjected processes of desire to introspection under test
conditions experimentally adjusted and varied according to a systematic plan. There are obviously
very great difŽculties in the way of such an undertaking, and it may be that these difŽculties are
insuperable. However this may be, the fact remains that experimental psychologists have not applied
their distinctive methods to the analysis of the conative complex as they have applied them to the
analysis of complex sounds or odours.

The key Žgures in British psychology at the turn of the century were, then,
psychologists of action in some fundamental sense. Moreover, the generation of inten-
tional action was a fundamental issue in the BPS’s early life. This article describes how
this enquiry has developed over the intervening century, and speculates on how it may
move forward in the next. I believe that a key to understanding how the psychology of
action has developed lies in the particular methodological problems that arise in studying
how the mind moves the body.

Methodological considerations in the psychology of action

A characteristic feature of psychology, both 100 years ago and today, has been its
experimental scientiŽc method. This typically involves varying a single experimental
factor and measuring any resulting change in observed phenomena (Mill’s ‘Method of
Difference’ (1846)). The experimenter manipulates a factor affecting the input to a
system, and draws inferences from the consequences observed at the output of the system.
This approach is most productive when experimental factors are easy to control and when
the observed phenomena are easy to measure.
However, early empirical psychology made much less progress on action than on the
other classical psychophysical problem of perception. This asymmetrical progress derives
from methodological difŽculties. Perception lends itself very naturally to controlled
experiments. Perceptual psychophysicists can easily manipulate physical stimuli and can
easily study perceptual states (often using a response as a convenient overt measure of the
percept). Because physical stimuli are relatively easy to manipulate, there is no effective
limit in the quantity, creativity and range of perceptual experiments. Our understanding
of perception has accordingly advanced dramatically during the last century.
With actions, in contrast, the input to the system is normally assumed to be the
intention, or will, or indeed conation, of the person who makes the action. This is an
internal mental state or event. It cannot directly be known or manipulated by the
experimenter. The experimenter can observe the output of the system, but cannot
characterize, let alone manipulate, the input that caused it. Most psychology of action
resorts to the weaker position of instructing a person to perform a particular action, and
speculating about the intentions that he or she will have employed to generate the
116 Patrick Haggard

observed action. This must be a primary reason why the scientiŽc study of action has
produced less progress than that of perception.
Additionally, it is much more difŽcult to measure actions than to elicit reports of
percepts. Data in perception experiments may consist of judgments (did the participant
perceive it or not?) or possibly of response latencies. Data in action experiments consist of
movements. Movements are difŽcult to measure and complex to describe. The psychol-
ogist of action must typically simplify the description of the output, perhaps by
measuring just one aspect of motor output, such as hand trajectories or response
forces. But these simpliŽed measurements of motor output risk ignoring the main
features of what the motor system does, and of how it does it. Not surprisingly, therefore,
improvements in the technology for recording and measuring movement have
often driven our scientiŽc understanding of movement control (e.g. Jeannerod, 1981;
Muybridge, 1899).

Epochs in the psychology of action

These twin problems of inaccessibility of input and intractability of the output meant
that, in its early years, experimental psychology did not deliver answers to these
fundamental questions, despite the clear articulation of the questions at an early stage
in the discipline’s development. For the same methodological reasons, many of the major
‘schools’ of psychology over the past 100 years have not focused speciŽcally on the
problems of action. The article now considers the view of action developed or implied by
some of the major schools of psychology.

Behaviourism
For example, the attitudes of behaviourism to the psychology of action were somewhat
confused. On the one hand, action occupies a central place in behaviourism, since only
behaviours are admissable as topics of psychological discourse, and all behaviours are
ultimately movements. On the other hand, the behaviourists Žnessed the possibility
that psychomotor processing might in itself be an important part of an animal’s
function.
In particular, behaviourists ignored the generative nature of action. The motor system is
generative in the sense that the physical actions that it produces are much more elaborate
than the descriptions of intentions or of environmental stimuli that constitute the inputs
to the system. Put another way, making an action that I will myself, or responding to an
external stimulus, must involve information expansion. Instead of characterizing the ways
that the control of action goes beyond the input information, behaviourists described
actions using a reex model. That is, actions were seen as atomic units of behaviour,
directly evoked by speciŽc stimuli, or by learned associations with speciŽc stimuli. On
the direct reex view, the action merely reected the content of the stimulus (Watson,
1913). On the less direct view (Skinner, 1998), our actions do have an operant role, but
they still merely reect the history of our past experiences. In either case, action-
generation processes are not of intrinsic psychological interest. Behaviourist views stress
the psychological power of sensory inputs, and thus miss the characteristic element of
human action, which is its internal generation.
 The psychology of action 117

Human performance
The human performance tradition in the psychology of action emerged from the applied
work of the Second World War years. The narrower term of ‘motor skills’ is also
associated with this tradition. The human performance tradition sought to describe the
performance of the human operator in a quantitative way, and to investigate factors which
affected performance either positively (e.g. training regimes) or negatively (e.g. fatigue).
The results would have important applications in selection and training of personnel—
particularly military personnel such as pilots—and in designing how people should
control machines. This tradition appears to have inuenced mainstream psychology to a
greater extent in Britain and North America than in the rest of Europe. Two
characteristics differentiate this tradition from the others outlined here. First, its applied
origins gave researchers a Žrm focus on motor performance. This contrasts with traditions
such as cognitive neuroscience, and ecological psychology, in which the interest in action
has largely emerged from work on perception. Secondly, the motor skills tradition had a
strong emphasis on quantifying motor output. For this reason, it often used simple
experimental tasks, such as visuomotor tracking of targets, which can systematically be
adjusted for difŽculty, and which yield continuous measures of performance such as
tracking error. Using such tasks allowed these researchers to describe the human mind as
a transfer function between input and output. Craik and Poulton, both working in
Cambridge, produced a substantial corpus of data on skilled performance under a wide
range of conditions (e.g. Craik, 1947; Poulton, 1978).
However, some of this applied work was essentially a description of human
performance, and lacked a strong theoretical position. The true value of the motor
skills tradition came in its later alliance with theoretical models of mind. In particular,
Broadbent’s (1958) concept of cognition as a single, limited-capacity, information-
processing channel Žtted well with quantifying the informational capacity of the human
operator. The well-deŽned, continuous control tasks and the direct quantitative
measures of the human performance tradition allowed detailed and revealing studies of
human information processing ability. The culmination of this approach was perhaps
A. T. Welford’s (1968) classic book Fundamentals of skill. This provides a wide summary
of the human mind from the point of view of its motor output capacity. In this sense, the
human performance tradition brought action closer to the centre of psychology than it
had been before or has been since.

Cognitive psychology: information-processing and skilled action

The cognitive psychology of action serves as a convenient term for the tradition during
the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s which emphasized the types of information, and the
processes operating on them, involved in producing skilled action. Interestingly,
cognitive psychology made relatively little progress in understanding action (compared
to the deep and productive changes that it brought to the study of, say, langugage and
thought). One plausible reason for this may be that the models of cognitive psychology
were developed to describe symbolic information-processing, and did not tranfer easily to
the non-symbolic computations that are required in controlling actions.
Cognitive psychology did, however, articulate some of the informational problems
involved in movement control. In particular, cognitive psychologists realized that the
118 Patrick Haggard

information-processing performed by the motor system was very substantial, even

though little of it entered into conscious awareness. SpeciŽcally, the motor system
must generate lots of information quickly for even the simplest action to succeed. This
realization led to an interest in informational economy: psychologists sought representa-
tions of action that simpliŽed the computations underlying movement. Much of this
debate centred on a single theoretical construct: the motor programme. The motor
programme was viewed as ‘a set of muscle commands that are structured before a
movement sequence begins, and that allows the entire sequence to be carried out’ (Keele,
1968). The motor programme, then, was a means to ‘chunk’ together prelearned motor
primitives into sequences which could be executed without the need for peripheral
feedback, and which therefore required little informational capacity for subsequent
execution. The motor programme also achieved informational economy by introducing a
hierarchical structure of the kind Žrst pioneered by Bernstein (1967). If actions are
represented centrally as sequences of several component movements, then higher
cognitive capacity is freed from the need to specify every detail at the component level.
Two main classes of data supported the motor programme construct. The Žrst was the
widespread Žnding of a monotonic relation between the latency of an action and the
complexity of the action (e.g. Henry & Rogers, 1960). This Žnding was interpreted as
evidence that some processing operations are applied to all the components of an action
before the execution of the Žrst component movement. The second line of evidence was
the common Žnding of invariant motor patterns: when an action is performed repeatedly,
some features remain remarkably constant. Independent representations of the individual
components would produce little systematic relation between those components. In
contrast, invariance was interpreted as evidence for a single higher-order representation of
the entire motor pattern. While the theoretical avour of these interpretations varied
widely, the essential idea of a Žxed higher-level representation remained the same. For
example, Tyldesley and Whiting (1975) observed that expert table tennis players made
essentially the same movement pattern every time they hit the ball. Rather than
adjusting the individual components of the stroke, they had learned to produce the
action as a complete sequence, without laborious processing of detail at the component
level. Their result also provides a good example of one theoretical strength of hierarchical
and motor programme theories: such theories provide a clear description of what is
learned in motor learning.
When the motor programme concept was Žrst developed, however, the most popular
argument for its informational economy was that motor programmes avoid the use of
peripheral feedback: it becomes unnecessary to chain each element in the motor sequence
explicitly to the one before. However, this informational economy at the execution stage
brings the risk of proliferation of motor programmes: a separate central programme
would be necessary for each minor variant of any action I might make. This argument is
supposed to lead to an impossible regress, as my brain cannot possibly store that many
programmes. The principle of informational economy was rescued by introducing the
generalized motor programme (GMP; Schmidt, 1975). This is perhaps the single idea in
the psychology of action which is most widely known by psychologists in general. The
GMP is a programme which speciŽes the relative timing of individual elements in an
action sequence. For example, in a programme for a tennis serve, it might specify
what proportion of the total movement time should be spent in the upswing and in the
 The psychology of action 119

follow-through. Running the programme faster or slower allows a whole range of actions
to be produced from just one programme. The GMP clearly implies that the relative
timing of components of action sequences should remain invariant as the total duration
varies. The anecdotal observation of how similar a person’s signature is, irrespective of the
timing and amplitude of the writing movements they make, supports the existence of
some abstract scaleable GMP-like representation. Nevertheless, a large number of
empirical studies have continued to focus on either ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’ hypotheses
about relative timing of movements (e.g. Laissard & Viviani, 1996; for a review of earlier
studies see Gentner, 1982). From the distance of a quarter-century, this line of research
now appears rather inward-looking, and it has not fed into a wider understanding of the
mental representation of action. The GMP concept appears to be waning in experimental
psychology, though it still dominates in other Želds such as sports science.
While human cognitive psychology did develop concepts of how actions were
represented, it had less to say about the processing operations which transformed those
representations into individual motor commands and, ultimately, into physical move-
ment. Two very different approaches to motor processing have Žgured in the recent
British psychology of action: the ecological psychology tradition and cognitive
neuroscience.

Ecological psychology of action

The ecological psychology of action evolved from the perceptual psychology of Gibson
(see Wade & Bruce, this issue), but two British psychologists working in the USA,
Michael Turvey and Scott Kelso, played a major role in its detailed development.
Gibson’s (1979) account of vision had stressed that the information necessary to support
action was directly speciŽed by the optic array. The ecological psychology of action
extended this approach to show how quite direct coupling of action parameters to visual
parameters can avoid the major conceptual problem in the psychology of action, namely
the problem of generating intentional action (Turvey, 1977). If the details of action
patterns are shown to follow directly from the details of the sensory environment, then
the philosophical problem of how ‘I’ can control my body is bypassed, and the
psychological problem of the need for informational economy in movement control is
alleviated. The ultimate aim of ecological psychology, then, is a solution to the Cartesian
mind–body problem.
Ecological psychologists of action accordingly sought examples of how perception and
action patterns could be coupled, and sought physical descriptions of the invariant
features of both perception and of action which could Žgure in such a coupling. Again,
British psychology made a substantial contribution, through the work of Dave Lee. In
one well-known study, the time at which diving gannets prepared their wings and body
for impact with water was shown to be related to a speciŽc phase of dilation of the optic
array (Lee & Reddish, 1981). In human prehension, the time at which the Žnger and
thumb aperture is adjusted to enclose an object has similarly been related to the time
remaining until the hand contacts the object (which can again be related to optic ow
variables; Savelsbergh, Whiting, & Bootsma, 1991). Both these results have, however,
been questioned recently (Wann, 1996).
At a broader psychological level, this general approach to the psychology of action has
120 Patrick Haggard

a number of implications. First, it tends to reduce all actions to the neural status of
reexes. In a simple reex, a single stimulus immediately and directly elicits a
proportional response. In the ecological approach, more complex sensory events are
supposed directly to specify more complex actions, but the insistence on the direct
sensorimotor correspondence recalls the reex concept. On the deŽnition of action given
at the start of this article, the ecological emphasis on direct speciŽcation inevitably would
fail to capture some aspects of the psychological control of action, notably the role of
goals, motor planning and intentions. Secondly, the emphasis on direct speciŽcation has
discouraged interest in how the nervous system may process and transform sensory
information to make it relevant to motor control. To this day, few ecological psychol-
ogists have integrated their work with sensorimotor neuroscience. Thirdly, the emphasis
on direct speciŽcation has encouraged the search for increasingly sophisticated descrip-
tions of sensory and of motor events which can be directly related. These higher order
invariants or order parameters (Kelso, 1997) draw on dynamic systems theory, and are often
quite complex. In some cases, the extraction of these parameters may seem to require as
much information-processing as has been saved by substituting the direct speciŽcation
approach for the information-generation approach.

Cognitive neuroscience of action

A second research tradition focusing on how information is processed to control actions
has emerged within cognitive neuroscience. A recent synthesis of this tradition is
presented by Jeannerod (1997). This tradition has used converging evidence from deŽcits
in neurological patients and from functional imaging, as well as behavioural measures to
study how different brain areas transform, combine and relay information to produce
motor commands. Interestingly, some of the major advances have again come in the area
of how sensory information is coupled to movement. Again, a distinctively British
contribution played a major role. Mel Goodale (working in Canada, but originally from
Britain) and David Milner at St Andrews reported the case of an agnosic patient, DF. DF
had a profound deŽcit in judgments of visual form, such as the orientation of bars, yet was
able to match the posture of her hand successfully to post an object through a slit which
could be presented at a range of orientations (Milner & Goodale, 1992). That is, visual
information which DF could not access for perceptual analysis in psychophysical tasks
was nevertheless available for the control of action. From this beginning, existing
distinctions between the ‘what’ and ‘where’ pathways in the visual system were expanded
into a more general distinction between a semantic ventral stream, terminating in the
temporal lobes, concerned with object representation and recognition, and a pragmatic
dorsal stream, terminating in the parietal cortex, concerned with describing the visual
world for the purpose of interacting with it.
At the time of writing, the psychology of action has, to some extent, become the
cognitive neuroscience of dorsal stream function. In my view the dorsal/ventral distinc-
tion in itself tells us much about perceptual processing, but rather less about the control
of action per se. However, current research has extended the original dorsal stream concept
to describe a parietal/premotor network (Jeannerod, Arbib, Rizzolatti, & Sakata, 1994).
This circuit appears to have the role of praxis, or transforming a given sensory object and
action goal into a set of skilled manual movements. Thus, cells in area AIP of the monkey
 The psychology of action 121

parietal cortex code speciŽc patterns of object manipulation, such as pulling levers and
turning objects (Taira, Mine, Georgopoulos, Murata, & Sakata, 1990). These parietal
areas project strongly into the premotor cortex. Here, neurons may Žre before and during
speciŽc classes of action, such as precision grip using the index Žnger, or power grip using
the whole hand. Moreover, some of these neurons are equally active when the speciŽc
action is made by the monkey, and when the monkey merely observes the trainer making
the action (di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, & Rizzolatti, 1992). The parietal-
premotor network has thus been viewed as containing a ‘vocabulary’ of possible actions,
and a mechanism for selecting among them on the basis of sensory inputs to parietal
cortex (Jeannerod et al., 1994). Convergent psychophysical evidence has followed:
priming by a congruent visual stimulus has been shown to facilitate movement initiation
times in a grasping task (Craighero, Fadiga, Umilta, & Rizzolatti, 1996) while focusing
on an incongruent distractor object causes altered grip patterns (Castiello, 1996).
While much of this research is clearly neuroscience in a broad sense, British
psychology has still played an important role. For example, Alan Allport in a seminal
paper (Allport, 1993) redeŽned the traditional perceptual problem of selective attention
(see Driver, this issue). Attention, he argued, is typically ‘selection for action’: the
selection of one object in the world for special processing when I perform an action on or
with that object. On this view, selective attention should not be seen as a perceptual Žlter,
but as an operation of the praxic parietal-premotor network.

Current issues in the psychology of action

It may also be useful in an article such as this to provide a snapshot of the psychology of
action at the time of writing. There follows a necessarily quite personal view of the
dominant themes in current research on the psychology of action.
The modern psychology of action is an interesting interdisciplinary hybrid. In recent
years, detailed knowledge of motor areas of the brain, coupled with strong developments
in modelling, have meant that central questions of movement control have been
addressed through collaborations between psychologists, neuroscientists and engineers.
Such studies go beyond those from previous epochs of the psychology of action, in that
they clearly identify distinct information-processing stages in the generation of action,
and model them explicitly. The next section illustrates this approach by summarizing
some of these stages.

Movement planning
The experience of engineers trying to control intelligent robots showed that even simple
motor planning computations, such as getting a robot arm to pick up a tool, were
extremely complicated. In controlling a robot, every stage of information-processing
from the highest task-level instruction (e.g. ‘pick up the tool’) to the detailed time-course
of the drive to each motor must be calculated explicitly. Robotic engineers were thus
doing explicitly what our brains must do unconsciously whenever we perform even
simple tasks like picking up a cup. This line of research showed psychologists that the
major information-processing problem in the control of action is that of information
expansion. This contrasts with information reduction stressed by classical theories of
122 Patrick Haggard

perception (e.g. Marr, 1982) which transform complex stimulus arrays into simple
descriptions of the locations of objects in the outside world. Hierarchical theories of
action, in contrast, emphasize the information that must be generated to go from an
intention to physical displacement of a limb or limbs. Information expansion operates
differently in motor planning and in motor execution. As these processes are attracting
increasing interest among psychologists, it is useful to characterize them briey here.
First, in motor planning, the motor system must go from a simple description of an
intention or a goal to a detailed speciŽcation of the movement which will achieve the
goal. A problem arises because there are almost always an inŽnity of possible movements
which will achieve the goal: but the motor system must choose just one. This is known as
the inverse kinematics problem. As an example, imagine I want to switch on a light. For
simplicity, let us also imagine that the switch and my right arm are all lying in the
horizontal plane of my shoulder. If I want to put my Žnger on the light switch to switch it
on, I can use at least three joints (shoulder, elbow, wrist). However, the position of the
switch (the goal) can be described with only two pieces of information: its x and y
coordinates in the external world. Therefore, the motor system faces a degrees of freedom
problem, because it needs to generate three pieces of information (shoulder, elbow and
wrist) angles from only two instructions. Nor is there a simple method for calculating the
extra piece of information: there is an inŽnite set of possible shoulder, elbow and wrist
angles I can make which all satisfy the goal of putting my Žnger on the light switch (try it
and see). Even from this very simpliŽed example, we see that our limbs are kinematically
redundant for most of the actions we perform: there is no single answer to the planning
question of ‘How do I do that?’. A kinematically redundant limb has the great advantage
of exibility. If there is an obstacle between me and my goal, I can still reach it
successfully if I can choose a different limb conŽguration to reach round it. However,
kinematic redundancy brings the disadvantage of having to generate information prior to
each action by selecting just one of a set of possible movements.

Movement selection and optimality

Perhaps the most popular solution to movement selection is based on cost functions and
the notion of optimality. This approach suggests that we choose whichever one of the
inŽnite number of possible movements has the lowest cost on some predeŽned cost
function. This approach has again proved popular from the robotic engineering
perspective: the computers which control robots have the computational power to
calculate the cost of each possible movement, and rapidly Žnd the movement with the
lowest cost. Moreover, given a sensible cost function, the optimality approach can be
guaranteed to solve the problem: there will always be one movement with the lowest cost.
However, there is a whole list of problems which make it difŽcult to accept
optimization as a psychological theory of motor planning. First, the human mind is not
efŽcient at exhaustive search and intensive numerical computation. If I had to calculate
the cost of a representative sample of joint postures each time I wanted to switch on the
light, it could take me so long that I would remain in the dark until the sun came up!
Secondly, it is unclear which costs should be minimized. In the last decade a wide range of
candidate cost functions have been proposed, including jerk (rate of change of accelera-
tion), change in joint torque and change in motor command. Indeed, the motor system
 The psychology of action 123

may choose between a range of cost functions (Rosenbaum, Meulenbrook, & Vaughan,
1996). Thirdly, however, this appears merely to regress the problem of selecting optimal
movements back towards the problem of selecting optimal cost functions. Interestingly,
most of the cost functions that have been suggested are related to physical features of
movement. The possibility that we may prefer movements which minimize the difŽculty
of mental events, such as motor planning computations, has only rarely been considered
(Haggard & Richardson, 1996).
A fourth problem, which has hardly been recognized in the literature, is that the cost
functions themselves may be too shallow to constrain movement selection in a functional
way. For example, suppose that the motor system aims to minimize muscular energy
expended when I move my arm to the light switch. Now, if all of the possible arm
movements I could make used very similar amounts of energy, and if energy were very
‘cheap’, then the process of optimal selection would seem unnecessary: any movement
would do. In reaching, for example, we seem not to take great care over choosing the
optimal movement, we just make a movement which is good enough. The motor system
must therefore have heuristics for selecting among actions which have equal or roughly
equal costs. We may not need to search for the minima of cost functions.

Processes during movement execution

The second major information-processing problem occurs in movement execution.
Psychologists have perhaps contributed more to the study of this problem than to the
problem of motor planning. Since Woodworth (1899), psychologists have asked whether
sensory feedback about the progress of movement is necessary for updating motor
commands during the control of action. We have already seen that the motor programme
concept is based on feedforward control: an entire sequence of movements is planned in
advance, and controlled with a single set of commands. No feedback information about
the state of the limbs is needed. However, movement errors which might arise, perhaps
because of an incorrect motor command or an environmental perturbation, clearly cannot
be compensated with this kind of feedforward control. Theoretical considerations aside, it
is clear that we do use sensory feedback to control our actions. For example, the accuracy
of aimed movements decreases in the absence of vision of the target and hand (Keele &
Posner, 1968). Moreover, pathologies which reduce the availability of proprioceptive
information from muscles, tendons and joints produce major motor impairments. In
particular, such patients are unable to maintain a constant motor output (Rothwell et al.,
1982).
Yet feedback raises a major information-processing difŽculty, because all feedback
information is delayed. Visual information for the guidance of movement is delayed in
the visual system, notably the retina. Proprioceptive information from muscles, tendons
and joints is delayed by the neural conduction time between the limbs and the brain.
Thus, any adjustments to motor commands based on feedback information are inevitably
out of date. Relying on feedback information during fast movements will not increase
accuracy, and will lead to instability. Keele and Posner (1968) found that vision of the
target and moving hand only improved the accuracy of aimed movements if these lasted
more than 200ms. The motor system thus faces a bandwidth problem in needing to use
detailed information about ongoing movement as fast as possible.
124 Patrick Haggard

It is interesting to look at the history of this issue over the 100 years of psychology
covered by the BPS. As we have seen, the problem was appreciated right at the start of the
period. In 1899, Woodworth observed that aimed movements often consisted of a
‘ballistic phase’ and a ‘homing phase’. The former corresponds to a feedforward command,
which drives the hand most of the distance to the target as quickly as possible. The latter
corresponds to a feedback system, which can provide accurate control by reducing
movement speed to a level compatible with feedback delays. Woodworth’s solution
proposed that motor control occurs in two distinct phases, each using its own mode of
control. After Woodworth, feedback-based views of motor control dominated in
psychology. For a start, they Žtted well with the behaviourists’ emphasis on reinforce-
ment and the role of feedback in learning. Moreover, they Žtted well with the expanding
physiological knowledge about the proprioceptive system. Crossman and Goodeve
(1983), for example, made a major British contribution to modelling of motor control
by using feedback systems as the basis for explaining the speed–accuracy trade off in
movement control known as Fitts’ Law (Fitts, 1954). In particular, they observed regular
oscillations in hand movement patterns at a frequency of around 10Hz. They attributed
these to corrections of the motor command driven by proprioceptive feedback. In their
model, both the accuracy and the duration of movement increase with the number of
these corrections, leading to the observed trade off.

Internal models
A second approach to motor execution, which has been very productive recently, uses
internal models to bypass feedback delays. This discussion focuses on just one example of
such systems: the Smith Predictor for aimed arm movement (Miall, Weir, Wolpart, &
Stein, 1993; see Fig. 1).
In a Smith Predictor, a controller is given the inverse problem of calculating motor

Figure 1. A Smith Predictor model of human reaching movements. Adapted from Miall et al. (1993).
 The psychology of action 125

commands from desired goals. The motor command moves the arm, producing delayed
sensory feedback in the outer of the two feedback loops. The fedback arm position is
compared to the desired goal, and the motor command adjusted accordingly, as in a
normal feedback system. The new addition lies in the inner loop. This takes a copy of the
motor command (so-called efference copy) and passes it to an ‘internal forward model’. The
model predicts what the state of the arm is now, given the motor command just sent. It
thus implements a function mapping commands to predicted limb position. The
predicted limb position can be compared with the desired goal position, in a second
feedback system, and the motor command updated accordingly. Importantly, all this is
done prior to the motor command reaching the arm itself. Thus, the inner loop through
the model is assumed to be entirely within the brain. It therefore avoids the feedback
delays that characterize the outer sensory feedback loop.
The success of this system clearly depends on the accuracy of the internal model. If the
internal model’s predictions of limb position are inaccurate, the updating of the motor
command will be inappropriate and the movement will miss the target. Moreover, the
relation between my central motor commands and their effects on my arm changes
constantly, notably when carrying a load in the hand or when fatigued. Therefore, an
efŽcient mechanism for updating the model is required. In the Smith Predictor
arrangement, the outer feedback loop is used to do this. Sensory feedback, though
delayed, is reliable and accurate. Therefore, the predicted state of the limb following a
motor command is compared to the limb’s sensed state. An additional delay is inserted
between the model and this comparator, to delay the output of the inner loop so its
information is synchronized with that in the outer loop. Any error signal from this
comparison is assumed to reect inaccurate prediction by the internal model, and is used
as a training signal to adjust the terms of the model. The recent interest in internal
models such as this one has contributed to the psychology of action in at least two ways,
which are described in the next section.

Towards a cognitive neuroscience of action

First, the internal model approach had led to a rehabilitation of motor learning. Motor
learning and motor skills have long been a focus of detailed empirical research on action
(see e.g. the review in Ch. IX of Welford (1968)). However, this large body of empirical
data tended to produce descriptions of how performance improved with practice, with
rather few theoretical insights into what was learned and how it was learned. In general,
the dependent variables measured, such as movement time or movement accuracy, could
not be related directly to identiŽed cognitive processes or learning mechanisms. The
internal model concept provides a strong theory about how and why performance
improves with practice. In recent years, the acquisition, consolidation and transfer of
internal models have been studied in some detail (Bhushan & Shadmehr, 1999). Though
much of this work takes place in a broader neuroscience context, the implications for
psychology are clear. In particular, the work of Daniel Wolpert in London (Wolpert &
Kawato, 1998) has described complete cognitive architectures for sensorimotor learning,
based on internal models. These theories yield strong predictions which can be tested
directly against movement behaviours, and they are starting to have a strong impact on
psychological work on motor learning. On the applied side, the new focus on learning of
126 Patrick Haggard

internal models should lead to improvements in rehabilitation and educational methods

in the future.
Secondly, the internal model approach has shown the value of a broadly neuroscientiŽc
approach to the psychology of action. Cognitive neuroscience analyses mental processes
by relating elements of processing models to speciŽc brain operations and brain
structures. Taking our example of the internal predictive model, an important element
in the cognitive neuroscience of action has thus been the localization of the internal
model, and the identiŽcation of the neural circuits implementing the associated inner
feedback loop. The recent emphasis on brain processes have advanced this project
considerably beyond what merely behavioural evidence can do. Several converging
lines of evidence point towards the cerebellum as providing the neural circuits which
may predict the consequences of our motor commands. Anatomically, the cerebellum
receives appropriate inputs of efference copy from the motor cortex, and contains
neural circuitry appropriate for control and for learning (Stein & Glickstein, 1992).
Physiologically, it is active during coordination tasks in which one movement has to be
synchronized with the instantaneous state of a second movement (Ramnani, Toni,
Passingham, & Haggard, 1998). Clinically, patients with cerebellar lesions produce
tremulous movements which are consistent with a lack of information about the progress
of movement for updating the motor command (Haggard et al., 1995). The cerebellum
may thus implement an internal predictive model of limb movement.

Conclusions
It seems appropriate to end this centenary review by drawing out some general principles
for evaluating the last century of the psychology of action, and by looking prospectively
towards future developments. I shall restrict myself to two evaluative comments. First,
the psychology of action has made its greatest intellectual progress, and had its widest
appeal to the scientiŽc and lay public, when it has focused on the central issues
concerning how the mind controls the body. When it has restricted itself to the narrower
conŽnes of what can easily be measured or identiŽed, it has had less reach, and has tended
to focus on the accumulation of paradigm-bound knowlege. This tendency has not
advanced the proŽle of action within psychology generally. Stout’s injunction that
experimentalists should not restrict their concepts to those that produce easy experiments
remains appropriate. The recent renaissance of experimental and neuroscience-based
studies of willed action (reviewed by Jahanshahi & Frith, 1998) seems like a welcome
return to these core concerns. In particular, the psychology of action needs to confront
directly and experimentally the problem of the internal generation of action. Whereas
previous schools in the psychology of action have followed through sensory and
perceptual accounts to describe their motor consequences, I suspect that studies of
internal generation of action will make the Želd more salient within psychology
generally.
Secondly, the psychology of action has made most progress when it has collaborated
with other disciplines. This may be unsurprising: most psychological frameworks since
Kant have rightly sprung from our introspections and from our conscious experience.
Since these tell us little about how we generate actions (see above), these frameworks
may be unsuitable for scientiŽc explanations of action. In contrast, interaction with
 The psychology of action 127

philosophy, engineering, neurophysiology and neuroanatomy has produced fruitful and

durable veins of progress in the psychology of action. But valuing interdisciplinarity does
not devalue the speciŽc contribution of psychologists. The fundamental questions of how
I can transform my thoughts into movements of my body are questions about mental
processing of information, and are thus intrinsically psychological. Future research in this
area should keep a strong hold of the psychological dimensions of the question, coupled
with the many classes of evidence required to reach an answer.

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