Abstract
We studied how rapidly subjects could retrieve the order of two actions in a goal hierarchy whose actions were temporally ordered. The subjects learned a four-level hierarchy of 27 goals and actions regarding steps for joining a secret club. Then, with respect to this hierarchy, they verified statements of the form “In order for you to accomplish X, you must have already completed Y” Response times were faster the farther X was from Y in the temporal ordering of the actions, which suggests that judgments were derived by referring to the relative locations of X and Y on a fuzzy time line. Yet when asked to indicate the structure of the subgoal relationships, the subjects drew the hierarchy. This result was replicated in a second experiment. Moreover, when asked to judge whether two actions came from the same one of two plans, the subjects responded no faster for close than for distant actions.
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This material is based on work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship for the first author and Grant MH 13950-17 from the National Institutes of Mental Health to the second author.
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Franklin, N., Bower, G.H. Retrieving actions from goal hierarchies. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 26, 15–18 (1988). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334847
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334847