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Article Dans Une Revue New Ideas in Psychology Année : 2010

Internalized activities

Résumé

This paper argues that interactive mental processes in humans have a natural tendency to replay internally and cyclically, a typical example being the tunes that run 'in our head' for hours. The existence of these 'internalized activities' may be shown by both simple introspection and neurological experiments, which also reveal that they occur in all sensory modalities and involve everything from perception to more abstract activities. We will show that this hypothesis provides new ways to explain 1-how real activity is guided by similar internalized activities, 2-how goals are represented to an agent by persistent internalized activities, 3-how the pursuit of these goals subordinates other activities. We account for such internalized activities by means of the sorts of interactive processes described by the interactivist model. They have a tendency, like that of Piaget schemes, to run cyclically, whenever possible. They are similar to real activities in that they draw on the same neural machinery, but their sensory-motor aspects are somehow inhibited. Not being enslaved to reality and its timing, they can run faster and in a discontinuous way. Multiple internalized processes may also co-occur with compatible sensory-motor operations, even though the latter are inhibited. When an activity is actually performed by an agent, we argue that a synchronization phenomenon makes previous similar activities run in an internalized way in parallel, and that they help to guide real activity by providing anticipated potentialities in real time. When we make a basketball shot, previous analogous shots run in internal synchrony at the same time, guiding the current attempt. A goal such as a successful shot can be initially present in the agent's mind as a persistent internalized activity. The tendency of internalized activities to run whenever possible allows for a sequence construction mechanism, which operates forward and backward, and permits the creation of sequences of internalized processes projecting from a current activity, such as dribbling against an opponent, to a goal activity, such as shooting. These ideas have been applied 1-to a computer program able to recognize musical rhythms by synchronizing actual rhythms to internalized ones, and 2-to the construction of a model of how an agent represents the routes it knows in a town and how these routes coordinate internally to produce sequences from a current location to a destination.
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hal-01966579 , version 1 (28-12-2018)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01966579 , version 1

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Jean-Christophe Buisson, Jean-Charles Quinton. Internalized activities. New Ideas in Psychology, 2010, 28 (3), pp.312-323. ⟨hal-01966579⟩
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