The Mental Representation of Goals

Working memory acts as the central executive officer
of cognition. It drives human action by coordinating
perception, memory, and motor processes with a
prioritized set of instructions as events unfold
over time. There is still much to explore on the
nature of working memory. These studies shed light
on one important piece of working memory that has
been infrequently explored, the importance of goals
and how they are represented in working memory. Four
experiments manipulated timing conditions, memory
loads, and extraneous events in an event counting
paradigm to reveal that greater time to process
information also leads to over-rehearsal,
distraction, and a tendency to make more errors.
These results imply a redefinition of working
memory s central executive function from more
traditional accounts. The results also drive
compelling conclusions addressing storage, linking,
and triggering of goal representations. Number
representation, error detection, and cognitive
modeling are explored.

Autorentext
Daniel Cassenti earned his Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University in Psychology in 2004. His research projects have led to publications in such topics as temporal cognition, working memory, cognitive modeling, robotics, and cognitive neuroscience. Dr. Cassenti is currently a research psychologist at U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

Klappentext
Working memory acts as the central executive officer of cognition. It drives human action by coordinating perception, memory, and motor processes with a prioritized set of instructions as events unfold over time. There is still much to explore on the nature of working memory. These studies shed light on one important piece of working memory that has been infrequently explored, the importance of goals and how they are represented in working memory. Four experiments manipulated timing conditions, memory loads, and extraneous events in an event counting paradigm to reveal that greater time to process information also leads to over-rehearsal, distraction, and a tendency to make more errors. These results imply a redefinition of working memory's central executive function from more traditional accounts. The results also drive compelling conclusions addressing storage, linking, and triggering of goal representations. Number representation, error detection, and cognitive modeling are explored.