ABSTRACT
Human beings have an astonishing ability to carry out and control complex behavior, and, moreover, they seem to do so without much effort and conscious awareness about the underlying computational complexity. More precisely, in addition to mere stimulus-response associations (e.g., activate the motor program to stop the car when encountering a red traffic light), humans have the unique ability to flexibly adapt behavior in response to a given task context (e.g., override the red traffic light to make room for an emergency ambulance). Psychologists, aiming at describing and explaining human nature, need to explicate why and how the processing of the identical perceptual information can drive different behavior. This leads to the fundamental question of how attention and action are generally controlled to allow for flexible, adaptive, and goal-directed behavior in a dynamically changing environment.
