Committing to Change

Committing to change is the “C” phase of the VECTOR virtual coaching process, and it focuses on collaborative goal setting. The authors share anecdotes of other virtual coaching goal-setting sessions and tips for setting goals based on the experiences of other virtual coaches. They also offer a goal-setting acronym—DREAMS—to help readers understand the components of a good goal and a goal-setting template that they have found works well for ensuring virtual coachees are able to make meaningful progress toward goal completion.

If I told you everyone picked that (inefficient) tool, would you? Children attend to normative language when imitating and transmitting tool use

In this study, we extended research on children’s imitation by examining the impact of normativity on children’s decision about whether to imitate inefficient actions in the context of tool use. In particular, this study explored how conventional language (highlighting norms) versus instrumental language (highlighting a desired end-goal) influenced children’s imitation and transmission of the use of an inefficient tool to achieve a particular end-goal. Rather than examining children’s imitation of unnecessary actions that do not impede goal-completion, we examined children’s conformity with a modeled behavior that may result in sacrificing goal completion. Thus, the stakes of conforming with the stated norm were higher than when children are asked to imitate a series of unnecessary actions that may not impede achieving a designated goal. Children (N = 96 4- to 6-year-olds) were presented with either a conventional or instrumental description of a model’s actions before watching the model choose an inefficient tool. Results indicated that children who heard conventional language imitated the model’s inefficient tool choice and chose to teach a third party to use the inefficient tool at significantly higher rates than when they heard instrumental language. The use of a within-subjects design allowed us to confirm that descriptions that included conventional language impacted children’s imitation and transmission of inefficient tool use above and beyond individual differences in children’s baseline imitation rate. The results have implications for the extent to which children will conform with what “we” are “supposed” to do.

Late-Action Effect: Heightened Counterfactual Potency and Perceived Outcome Reversibility Make Actions Closer to a Definitive Outcome Seem More Impactful

We report a consistent effect in the evaluation of actions: later actions – specifically, actions that are closer to a final, positive outcome - are considered as contributing more to that outcome, compared to earlier actions. Ten experiments (total n = 5307, five pre-registered, with U.S. American and British participants, manipulating action timing both within-subjects and between-subjects) provide evidence in support of a late-action effect. This effect extends to different domains, from sports to business to academics. We identify two mediators. The first is a heightened tendency to imagine negative alternative scenarios when the action is closer to an outcome, that is, higher counterfactual potency for later actions. The second is perceived outcome reversibility – lower for later actions, when there is less time for the provisional outcome to change. The effect is mitigated if people are instructed to imagine counterfactual outcomes (consistent with the notion of a counterfactual potency mediation), and if the action does not produce a provisional outcome change. We discuss theoretical implications for the psychological understanding of timing, causality attributions, and counterfactual thinking, as well as future research directions for goal-gradient (the tendency to give more weight to the last steps towards goal completion) and procrastination.

Reminding customers to be loyal: does message framing matter?

Purpose Marketers may proactively give customers personalized notices regarding their progress toward certain rewards as a means to stimulate ongoing behaviors. This paper aims to investigate the effect on customer repatronage intention by framed messages concerning either goal-distance or consequences of an action and it also seeks to identify important variables moderating those responses. Design/methodology/approach Five between-subjects experiments examined how participants’ repatronage intentions, in response to the framing of goal-distance (Study 1a) and consequences of an action (Study 2a), varied as a function of their level of progress toward goal completion and also tested if the framing effects might be attenuated when relationship benefit was high rather than low (Studies 1b and 2b). They further adopted perceived reciprocity as an underlying mechanism for examining the interplay between these two kinds of framing in stimulating ongoing behavior (Study 3). Findings Although messages which emphasized what individuals need to spend more to attain a reward (versus how short they are from earning a reward) or loss following inaction (versus gain following action) were likely to erode intention, such effects were confined to individuals with a moderate level of progress. This intention-eroding effect was further attenuated by attractive reward. The persuasive advantages of short-from-the-end framing of goal-distance over more-to-the-end counterparts were found to be diminished when paired with a loss-framed message concerning consequences of an action. Furthermore, the observed effects on intention were mediated by perceived reciprocity. Originality/value The studies add to the current understanding of how the way in which information is presented might enhance loyalty or fail to do so.

Neural circuitry for behavioural arrest

The ability to stop ongoing movement is fundamental to animal survival. Behavioural arrest involves the hierarchical integration of information throughout the forebrain, which ultimately leads to the coordinated inhibition and activation of specific brainstem motor centres. Recent advances have shed light on multiple regions and pathways involved in this critical behavioural process. Here, we synthesize these new findings together with previous work to build a more complete understanding of the circuit mechanisms underlying suppression of ongoing action. We focus on three specific conditions leading to behavioural arrest: goal completion, fear and startle. We outline the circuitry responsible for the production of these behaviours and discuss their dysfunction in neurological disease. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Movement suppression: brain mechanisms for stopping and stillness’.

When Attended and Conscious Perception Deactivates Fronto-Parietal Regions

Conscious and attended perception is commonly thought to elicit fronto-parietal activity. However, supportive evidence comes largely from studies which involve detecting a target and reporting its visibility. This approach confounds conscious perception with goal completion of either the perceptual task of detection or the metacognitive task of introspective reporting. In contrast, in real life such perceptions are a means of achieving goals and rarely a goal in themselves, and almost never involve explicit metacognitive reports. It therefore remains unclear if fronto-parietal activity is indeed a correlate of conscious perception or is the result of confounds related to goal completion. Here we show that conscious and attended perception when delinked from goals does not increase fronto-parietal activity, and when inconsequential for the goal may even deactivate these regions. In experiments 1 and 2 participants attended to a highly visible stream of letters to detect the occasional targets in their midst. The non-target letters, in spite of being visible and attended to, deactivated fronto-parietal regions. In experiment 3 we looked at the activity elicited by a loud auditory cue that had to be kept in memory for up to 9 s and used to select the correct rule for completing the goal. Even such a salient, attended and remembered event did not elicit prefrontal activity. Across these experiments conscious and attended perception only activated the relevant sensory regions while goal completion events activated fronto-parietal regions.Significance statementConsciousness and attended perception has been seen to correlate with fronto-parietal activity. This informs key theories of consciousness and attention, e.g. widespread availability of incoming information or its higher level representation causes perceptual awareness, or that top down attention during perception broadcasts incoming sensations into frontal and parietal regions. However such experiments unwittingly conflate attended and conscious perception with some form of goal completion, whereas such perception in our daily life mostly serves as a means of goal completion and not a goal in itself. Here we show that such perception when delinked from goal completion does not activate fronto-parietal regions, and may even deactivate these regions if the percept is inconsequential for goal completion.

Autobiographical Planning and the Brain: Activation and Its Modulation by Qualitative Features

To engage in purposeful behavior, it is important to make plans, which organize subsequent actions. Most studies of planning involve “look-ahead” puzzle tasks that are unrelated to personal goals. We developed a task to assess autobiographical planning, which involves the formulation of personal plans in response to real-world goals, and examined autobiographical planning in 63 adults during fMRI scanning. Autobiographical planning was found to engage the default network, including medial-temporal lobe and midline structures, and executive control regions in lateral pFC and parietal cortex and caudate. To examine how specific qualitative features of autobiographical plans modulate neural activity, we performed parametric modulation analyses. Ratings of plan detail, novelty, temporal distance, ease of plan formulation, difficulty in goal completion, and confidence in goal accomplishment were used as covariates in six hierarchical linear regression models. This modeling procedure removed shared variance among the ratings, allowing us to determine the independent relationship between ratings of interest and trial-wise BOLD signal. We found that specific autobiographical planning, describing a detailed, achievable, and actionable planning process for attaining a clearly envisioned future, recruited both default and frontoparietal brain regions. In contrast, abstract autobiographical planning, plans that were constructed from more generalized semantic or affective representations of a less tangible and distant future, involved interactions among default, sensory perceptual, and limbic brain structures. Specific qualities of autobiographical plans are important predictors of default and frontoparietal control network engagement during plan formation and reflect the contribution of mnemonic and executive control processes to autobiographical planning.