1 Attention to Action
Willed and Automatic Control of Behavior
DoNALD A. NoRMAN AND TIM SHALLICE
Much effort has been made to understand the role of attention in per-
ception; much less effort has been placed on the role attention plays in
the control of action. Our goal in this chapter is to account for the role
of attention in action, both when performance is automatic and when
it is under deliberate conscious control. We propose a theoretical frame-
work structured around the notion of a set of active schemas, organized
according to the particular action sequences of which they are a part,
awaiting the appropriate set of conditions so that they can become se-
lected to control action. The analysis is therefore centered around ac-
tions, primarily external actions, but the same principles apply to in-
ternal actions-actions that involve only the cognitive processing
mechanisms. One major emphasis in the study of attentional processes
is the distinction between controlled and automatic processing of percep-
tual inputs (e.g., Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977). Our work here can be seen
as complementary to the distinction between controlled and automatic
processes: we examine action rather than perception; we emphasize the
situations in which deliberate, conscious control of activity is desired
rather than those that are automatic.
In this chapter we will be particularly concerned with the different
ways in which an action is experienced. To start, examine the term
automatic: it has at least four different meanings. First, it refers to the
way that certain tasks can be executed without awareness of their per-
formance (as in walking along a short stretch of flat, safe ground). Sec-
DoNALD A. NoRMAN e Institute for Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego,
La Jolla, California 92093. TIM SHALLICE e Medical Research Council, Applied Psychology
Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge, CB2 2EF England. Research support to D. A. Norman
was provided by the Personnel and Training Research Programs, Office of Naval Research
under contract N00014-79-C-0323. The collaboration was made possible by a grant from
the Sloan Foundation to the Program in Cognitive Science at UCSD. Support was also
provided by grant MH-15828 from the National Institute of Mental Health to the Center
for Human Information Processing.
R. J. Davidson et al. (eds.), Consciousness and Self-Regulation 1
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1986
2 DoNALD A. NoRMAN AND TIM SHALLICE
ond, it refers to the way an action may be initiated without deliberate
attention or awareness (as in beginning to drink from a glass when in
conversation). Third, it is used in cases such as the orienting response,
in which attention is drawn automatically to something, with no delib-
erate control over the direction of attention. And finally, within con-
temporary cognitive psychology, the term automatic is often defined op-
erationally to refer to situations in which a task is performed without
interfering with other tasks. In this situation, automatic is principally
defined to mean that the task is performed without the need for limited
processing resources _(Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977), although variations
on this theme are prevalent (e.g., Kahneman & Treisman, 1983; Posner,
1978).
It is possible to be aware of performing an action without paying
active, directed attention to it. The most general situation of this type
is in the initiation of routine actions. Phenomenally, this corresponds
to the state that Ach (1905) describes as occurring after practice in re-
action time tasks. Over the first few trials, he said, the response is pre-
ceded by awareness that the action should be made, but later there is
no such awareness unless preparation has been inadequate. In such
well-learned tasks the subject does experience the response as proceed-
ing with "an awareness of determination/' even if it is not immediately
preceded by any experience of intention to act. Awareness of deter-
mination can, however, be absent. One example comes from the study
of slips of action (Norman, 1981; Reason, 1979; Reason & Mycielska,
1982): one may find oneself doing a totally unexpected set of actions,
much to one's own dismay.
In contrast to acts undertaken without active, directed attention
being paid to them are those carried out under deliberate conscious
control. This distinction corresponds closely to Williams James's (1890)
distinction between "ideo-motor" and "willed" acts. To James, "wher-
ever movement follows unhesitatingly and immediately the notion of it
in the mind, we have ideo-motor action. We are then aware of nothing
between the conception and the execution." He contrasted these with
acts which require will, where "an additional conscious element in the
shape of a fiat, mandate, or expressed consent" is involved.
Experientially, a number of different sorts of tasks appear to require
deliberate attentional resources. These tasks fit within the following
categories:
1. They involve planning or decision making
2. They involve components of troubleshooting
3. They are ill-learned or contain novel sequences of actions
4. They are judged to be dangerous or technically difficult
