Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to act purposefully demands formulating intentions in the form of mental representation of actions required to achieve a purpose. Goal-directed behavior also needs apt control of attention for its completion. Here, by using a selective attention task for stimuli presented with an intended/unintended orthogonal feature, we attempted to understand the underlying mechanisms of how our intentions to get self-chosen outcomes modulate attentional and inhibitory processes. Results show a processing advantage for intended outcomes and no disadvantage for unintended or unselected outcomes compared to a neutral outcome. The findings support the role of intention in monitoring and control of action outcomes, as suggested by the dynamic theory of intention.