Cognitive Foundations and Control of Prevention Actions

The human action repertoire encompasses a diverse range of behaviors. Viewing these behaviors through the lens of a goal-centered framework reveals two complementary action types: production and prevention actions. Research on action control has traditionally focused on production actions. However, integrating prevention actions into respective theories is crucial as they fundamentally differ in the structure of their goals: While production actions aim at the presence of observable events, prevention actions aim at the absence of such events. Therefore, it is unclear how mechanistic action control theories can incorporate cognitive representations of prevention actions. In this thesis, I investigated whether prevented events can become linked to their corresponding actions and whether the anticipation of prevented events influences actions in all action phases. The first series of experiments revealed that prevented events are represented during action selection and execution similarly to produced events (first article). This interpretation was strengthened by subsequent systematic testing of new methodological insights (second article). The next experimental series revealed that prevented events are represented during action monitoring, albeit to a lesser extent than produced events (third article). Knowing that prevented events become linked to their corresponding actions, I specified the representational nature of this linkage further (fourth article): Thereby, I showed that although action-event linkages in prevention are based on propositions, they influence behavior akin to associative, unqualified linkages. Together, these findings specify the representational content of prevention actions in terms of a two-step process, involving an initial affirmative representation of the prevented event and a subsequent negation. Furthermore, integrated into research on avoidance learning, these findings demonstrate that high-level expectations of whether and when avoided events are expected directly influence low-level behavior. Lastly, the specification of propositional and associative subparts of cognitive processes shows that prevention actions are a valuable tool for testing theoretical assumptions in goal-centered action control models.