Ruud Custers

Utrecht University | UU · Department of Psychology

Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making are distinct from traditional accounts in psychology and neuroscience. While these traditional accounts focus on limitations of the human mind as a major source of bounded rationality, the sampling approach originates in a broader cognitive-ecological perspective. It starts from the fundamental as...

Unlabelled: Research shows that stimuli in the environment can trigger behavior via the activation of goal representations. This process can be tested in the Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) paradigm, where stimuli can only affect behavior through the activation of the representation of its desired outcome (i.e., the PIT effect). Previous...

A large amount of literature demonstrates that social behaviour can be triggered by environmental cues. A long-standing debate involves the question of whether such stimuli trigger behaviour directly (i.e. habits) or whether these effects mediate goals. As studies on automatic goal pursuit typically use real-world cues that are already associated w...

A major part of our daily activities is goal-directed and tends to become a habit after practice. Practice makes perfect. In terms of the ideomotor (IM) principle, merely thinking of an outcome can automatically trigger the action associated with it. Contrary to prior IM evidence, the present findings present the alternative view that propositions...

Risk-taking is traditionally explained through outcome-value expectancy models. Recently, however, it has been demonstrated that immediate versus delayed feedback increases risk-taking independently of expected value. The current work takes a novel approach to investigate behavioral motivation in different risk-taking contexts, building on recent p...

People form coherent representations of goal-directed actions. Such agency experiences of intentional action are reflected by a shift in temporal perception: self-generated motor movements and subsequent sensory effects are perceived to occur closer together in time—a phenomenon termed intentional binding. Building on recent research suggesting tha...

The experience of being an intentional agent is a key component of personal autonomy. Here, we tested how undermining intentional action affects the sense of agency as indexed by intentional binding. In three experiments using the Libet clock paradigm, participants judged the onset of their action (key presses) and resulting effect (auditory stimul...

Prospective memory (PM) refers to the cognitive processes associated with remembering to perform an intended action after a delay. Varying the salience of PM cues while keeping the intended response constant, we investigated the extent to which participants relied on strategic monitoring, through sustained, top–down control, or on spontaneous retri...

In the current article, we test the prediction that an initial bias favoring 1 of 2 equally rewarding options—either based on a genuine contingency or a pseudocontingency in a small sample of initial observations—can survive over an extended period of further sampling from both options, when the reward structure fosters exploitation. Specifically,...

While known reinforcers of behavior are outcomes that are valuable to the organism, recent research has demonstrated that the mere occurrence of an own-response effect can also reinforce responding. In this paper we begin investigating whether these two types of reinforcement occur via the same mechanism. To this end, we modified two different task...

Human habits are widely assumed to result from stimulus-response (S-R) associations that are formed if one frequently and consistently does the same thing in the same situation. According to Ideomotor Theory, a distinct but similar process could lead to response-outcome (R-O) associations if responses frequently and consistently produce the same ou...

Cognitive control allows the coordination of cognitive processes to achieve goals. Control may be sustained in anticipation of goal-relevant cues (proactive control) or transient in response to the cues themselves (reactive control). Adolescents typically exhibit a more reactive pattern than adults in the absence of incentives. We investigated how...

Intentional motor actions and their effects are bound together in temporal perception, resulting in the so-called intentional binding effect. In the current study, we address an alternative explanatory mechanism for the emergence of temporal binding by excluding the role of motor action. Employing a sensory-based Libet clock paradigm, we examined t...

Human habits are considered to be an important root of societal problems. The significance of habits has been demonstrated for a variety of behaviors in different domains, such as work, transportation, health, and ecology, suggesting that habits have a pervasive impact on human life. Studying and changing habits in societal context requires a broad...

The Oxford Handbook of Human Motivation, Second Edition, addresses key advances made in the field since the previous edition, offering the latest insights from the top theorists and researchers of human motivation. The volume includes chapters on social learning theory, control theory, self-determination theory, terror management theory, and regula...

The human ability to anticipate the consequences that result from action is an essential building block for cognitive, emotional, and social functioning. A dominant view is that this faculty is based on motor predictions, in which a forward model uses a copy of the motor command to predict imminent sensory action-consequences. Although this account...

Awareness of action is a pervasive personal experience that is crucial in understanding self-generated and other-generated actions as well as their effects. A large body of research suggests that action awareness, as measured by the magnitude of temporal binding between an action and its effect in an operant action task (i.e., intentional binding),...

The way humans perceive the outcomes of their actions is strongly colored by their expectations. These expectations can develop over different timescales and are not always complementary. The present work examines how long-term (structural) expectations – developed over a lifetime - and short-term (contextual) expectations jointly affect perception...

Sounds that result from our own actions are perceptually and neurophysiologically attenuated compared to sounds with an external origin. This sensory attenuation phenomenon is commonly attributed to prediction processes implicated in motor control. However, accumulating evidence suggests that attenuation effects can also result from prediction proc...

Perception is strongly shaped by the actions we perform. According to the theory of event coding, and forward models of motor control, goal-directed action preparation activates representations of desired effects. These expectations about the precise stimulus identity of one’s action-outcomes (i.e. identity predictions) are thought to selectively i...

In this chapter, we address the mechanisms of habit to promote a better understanding and examination of how habits are learned and maintained in humans. Because habits are often conceived of as automated behaviours resulting from learning and practice, we start with the typical features that represent automatic processes. Next, we discuss how habi...

As agents seeking to learn how to successfully navigate their environments, humans can both obtain knowledge through direct experience, and second-hand through communicated beliefs. Questions remain concerning how communicated belief (or instruction) interacts with first-hand evidence integration, and how the former can bias the latter. Previous re...

Most human action is goal-directed, that is, aimed at obtaining desired outcomes. Basically, goal-directed action relies on knowledge about what actions produce a particular outcome and which outcomes are desirable. Research on ideomotor learning provides insight into how action-outcome knowledge is acquired whereas research on incentive learning d...

Goal pursuit is known to be impaired in schizophrenia, but nothing much is known in these patients about unconscious affective processes underlying goal pursuit. Evidence suggests that in healthy individuals positive subliminal cues are taken as a signal that goal pursuit is easy and therefore reduce the effort that is mobilized for goal attainment...

Shifting attention is an effortful control process and incurs a cost on the cognitive system. Previous research suggests that rewards, such as monetary gains, will selectively enhance the ability to shift attention when this demand for control is explicitly cued. Here, we hypothesized that prospective monetary gains will selectively enhance the abi...

Human reward pursuit is often assumed to involve conscious processing of reward information. However, recent research revealed that reward cues enhance cognitive performance even when perceived without awareness. Building on this discovery, the present functional MRI study tested two hypotheses using a rewarded mental-rotation task. First, we exami...

Reward cues have been found to increase the investment of effort in tasks even when cues are presented suboptimally (i.e. very briefly), making them hard to con-sciously detect. Such effort responses to suboptimal reward cues are assumed to rely mainly on the mesolimbic dopa-mine system, including the ventral striatum. To provide further support fo...

Recent years have seen a rejuvenation of interest in studies of motivation-cognition interactions arising from many different areas of psychology and neuroscience. The present issue of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience provides a sampling of some of the latest research from a number of these different areas. In this introductory artic...

Although people often deliberate about the monetary consequences of their actions, money may also influence us in more subtle ways. The current chapter explores the ways in which cues related to money may influence people’s behavior without their awareness. First, cues related to money may convey information about what is at stake in a certain task...

The question of how human performance can be improved through rewards is a recurrent topic of interest in psychology and neuroscience. Traditional, cognitive approaches to this topic have focused solely on consciously communicated rewards. Recently, a largely neuroscience-inspired perspective has emerged to examine the potential role of conscious a...

The present paper aims to advance the understanding of the control of human behavior by integrating two lines of literature that so far have led separate lives. First, one line of literature is concerned with the ideomotor principle of human behavior, according to which actions are represented in terms of their outcomes. The second line of literatu...

Learning from feedback involves a network of various cortical and subcortical regions. Although activation in this network has been shown to be especially strong in successful learners, it is currently unclear which of these regions are related to within-subject variation in learning performance. To this aim, 21 subjects performed a probabilistic f...

Experimental research in psychology has discovered that human goal pursuit originates and unfolds in the unconscious. Our behavior is directed and motivated by goals outside of conscious awareness in the current situation or environment. In this chapter we review past and current research that examines these goal-priming effects. Our review is orga...

Building on research on unconscious human goal pursuit and the dynamic nature of our mental and physical world, this study examined the idea that an unconsciously activated goal hijacks executive control for its own attainment. This "hijacking" of the executive function by an unconscious goal should be evidenced by impaired performance on an unrela...

Human reward pursuit is often found to be governed by conscious assessments of expected value and required effort. Yet research has also indicated that rewards are initially valuated and processed outside of awareness by rudimentary brain structures. Building on both of these findings, we propose a new framework for understanding human performance...

Three studies illustrate that mindful attention prevents impulses toward attractive food. Participants received a brief mindfulness procedure in which they observed their reactions to external stimuli as transient mental events rather than subjectively real experiences. Participants then applied this procedure to viewing pictures of highly attracti...

When in pursuit of rewards, humans weigh the value of potential rewards against the amount of effort that is required to attain them. Although previous research has generally conceptualized this process as a deliberate calculation, recent work suggests that rudimentary mechanisms-operating without conscious intervention-play an important role as we...

Building on previous research on the role of positive affect as implicit motivator we investigated both flexibility and rigidity in goal-directed behavior. Given that goal-directed behavior can be represented in terms of goals or means, we suggest that goal-directed behavior is more flexible in switching means when positive affect implicitly motiva...

The conscious awareness of voluntary action is associated with systematic changes in time perception: The interval between actions and outcomes is experienced as compressed in time. Although this temporal binding is thought to result from voluntary movement and provides a window to the sense of agency, recent studies challenge this idea by demonstr...

Human society is strongly rooted in people's experiences of agency; that is, the pervasive feeling that one engages in voluntary behavior and causes one's own actions and resulting outcomes. Rewards and positive affect play an important role in the control of voluntary action. However, the role of positive reward signals in the sense of agency is p...

In tournaments in various sports that feature one-on-one competition, the trophy is sometimes prominently displayed near the athletes during the final. Based on recent research on subtle reward cues, we propose that such trophies have the potential to induce choking under pressure in the match favourites, who are known to be most at risk. To test t...

Monetary rewards facilitate performance on behavioral and cognitive tasks, even when these rewards are perceived without conscious awareness. Also, recent research suggests that consciously (vs. unconsciously) perceived rewards may prompt people to more strongly concentrate on task stimuli and details. Here we propose that the latter is sometimes d...

It is generally assumed that storing predictive relations between two events (E(1) consistently precedes E(2)) in memory as bi-directional associations does not require conscious awareness of this relation, whereas the formation of unidirectional associations that capture the direction of the relation (priming e(1) activates e(2), but e(2) not e(1)...

Previous research suggests that priming of behavioral concepts (e.g., drinking water) motivates consumers outside conscious awareness, but only if primes match a current need (e.g., fluid deprivation). The present article reports two studies testing whether subliminal conditioning (subliminally priming a behavioral concept and linking it to positiv...

Custers and Aarts (2010b) demonstrated that whether predictive relations between two events are stored in memory as unidirectional or bi-directional structures does not depend on awareness, but on attention. Here, the role of attention and top-down processes in producing these effects are investigated more closely.

Blissful Ignorance? Although recent research has established the remarkable ways in which cognitive processing can occur without our being aware of it—for instance, casual exposure to retiree-related words, such as “elderly,” induces us to walk more slowly—behavior that is directed toward goals still seems to be the product of conscious thought. Cu...

While both conscious and unconscious reward cues enhance effort to work on a task, previous research also suggests that conscious rewards may additionally affect speed-accuracy tradeoffs. Based on this idea, two experiments explored whether reward cues that are presented above (supraliminal) or below (subliminal) the threshold of conscious awarenes...

Henk Aarts is trained as an experimental social psychologist at Nijmegen University where he worked on habit and decision making and received his PhD in 1996. He worked at Eindhoven University of Technology and Leiden University. Since 2004 he has been a full professor in social psychology at Utrecht University. His work deals with several topics r...

Ruud Custers received an education in human–technology interaction at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he graduated cum laude on work investigating the role of memory in the formation of judgments about environments. Subsequently, he moved to Utrecht University to pursue his PhD in experimental social psychology. He received his PhD cum la...

Three experiments explored the effects of priming the achievement concept on the expectation of performance outcomes and experiences of self-agency over outcomes in a task in which performance outcomes were dependent on chance. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that achievement priming produced expectations of higher (more successful) outcomes prior to wor...

The conscious experience of self-agency (i.e., the feeling that one causes one's own actions and their outcomes) is fundamental to human self-perception. Four experiments explored how experienced self-agency arises from a match between nonconsciously activated outcome representations and the subsequent production of the outcome and explored specifi...

Research suggests that the motivation to perform specific behaviours can originate in the unconscious. This implicit motivation can generally be traced to two basic sources: Deprivation of essential resources and positive affect attached to the specific behaviour. Yet, whereas previous research has increased our understanding of the emergence of im...

Two experiments tested the functional perception hypothesis (Bruner, 1957) according to which objects that are instrumental in attaining ones’ goals are perceived to be bigger if one is motivated to attain these goals. Study 1 demonstrated that participants perceived a glass of water to be bigger when deprived of fluid, and that this effect mainly...

In the last decade, there has been a tremendous surge of research on the mechanisms of human action. This volume brings together this new knowledge in a single, concise source, covering most if not all of the basic questions regarding human action: what are the mechanisms by which action plans are acquired, mentally represented, activated, selected...

Recent work has discovered that human goal pursuit can emerge in the absence of conscious awareness. Whereas the evidence of these goal priming effects is mounting, it remains a mystery how the mental apparatus informs people to pursue a primed goal in the absence of conscious will. This paper addresses this issue by proposing an affective-motivati...

The ability to overcome obstacles is widely regarded as a sign of motivation. Building on recent research on nonconscious goal pursuit, two experiments are presented that test whether activating the goal of helping outside people's awareness by exposure to social stereotypes causes them to overcome physical and social obstacles. Experiment 1 establ...

Building on recent research into the emergence of human motivation and goal pursuit in the absence of the conscious awareness of the source of this pursuit, the present article aimed to shed light on how states of deprivation (e.g., deprivation of fluid) actually produce the motivation and corresponding behavior that lifts the deprivation. Two stud...

The mere activation of the idea of a behavioral act moves the human body without the person consciously deciding to take action. In an experiment, we showed that people subliminally primed with the concept of exertion were faster to squeeze a hand grip forcefully but expended more effort when the subliminal primes were directly accompanied by consc...

This research tested the hypothesis that perception of goal-discrepant situations automatically (i.e., without conscious intent) facilitates access to representations of instrumental actions if goal representations are mentally accessible. Employing a probe-recognition paradigm, Experiment 1 established that sentences describing situations that are...

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the mere priming of the representation of a goal state motivates people to pursue this state to the extent that it is associated with positive affect. In Experiment 1, all participants completed an affective priming task in which the goal concept of “socializing” was primed and tested for positive valence....

Extending on the recent investigation into the implicit affective processes underlying motivation and decision making, 5 studies examined the role of negative affect in moderating goal priming effects. Specifically, experimental effects on measures that typify motivational qualities of goal systems, such as keeping a goal at a heightened level of m...

Our repertoire of social behavior may include the ability to grasp and take on the goals of others automatically - that is, without conscious intent. Two experiments tested and confirmed the hypothesis that priming social groups causes individuals to pursue the goals stereotypical for members of those groups. Study 1 found that participants provide...

Three experiments examined whether the mere priming of potential action effects enhances people's feeling of causing these effects when they occur. In a computer task, participants and the computer independently moved a rapidly moving square on a display. Participants had to press a key, thereby stopping the movement. However, the participant or th...

Recent research has revealed that nonconscious activation of desired behavioral states--or behavioral goals--promotes motivational activity to accomplish these states. Six studies demonstrate that this nonconscious operation of behavioral goals emerges if mental representations of specific behavioral states are associated with positive affect. In a...

In recent treatments of habitual social behaviour, habits are conceptualized as a form of goal-directed automatic behaviour that are mentally represented as goal-action links. Three experiments tested this conceptualization in the context of students' drinking (alcohol consumption)habits. Participants were randomly assigned to conditions where eith...

Recent research demonstrates that goal pursuit can be instigated without conscious interventions when the mental accessibility of goal representations is enhanced by environmental cues. However, the mechanisms producing this non-conscious, motivational, goal-directed activity are not clearly addressed in the literature. In this chapter we present a...

Previous research (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2003) has shown that mental representations of situational norms (e.g., behaving quietly in libraries) and corresponding overt behaviors are capable of being automatically activated. Two experiments extended this line of research by investigating the conditional role of the tendency to conform to social norm...

The present paper deals with a process-oriented approach to evaluative judgments of environments. Expanding on research in social judgment we hypothesized that whether or not memory of environments is consulted to provide judgments is conditional on processing goals. That is, goals determine on which dimensions impressions of environments are forme...