Colloquium: Substituting Atypical Intended Actions for Routine Actions

Nearly every day I turn left when I reach Vincent St to get home. One day I formed an intention while at work to buy sunscreen from the Chemist on my way home, which required me to turn right at Vincent St instead. Later that day I found myself at home without sunscreen. Failure to substitute atypical intended actions for routine actions are historically documented but poorly understood. Not only must an individual remember a new, episodic task, but that task must compete for retrieval with routine task goals. Two experiments are reported that employed a delayed response methodology to examine the control processes by which individuals maintain intentions and how intentions are associatively cued. Failure to deviate from routine and response costs to a lexical decision task were both reduced when task responses were systematically delayed. This is likely the case because evidence for the atypical intended action was given extra time to accumulate while not in response competition with the lexical decision task. A limitation of current theories is that they only focus on the strength of the environmental cue-intended action response mapping. The presented data suggests that more emphasis needs to be placed on examining the nature of competing routine task sets.