# Perceptual Control; Association; ThreeCV1 update

**URL:** http://discourse.iapct.org/t/perceptual-control-association-threecv1-update/8767
**Category:** CSG1995
**Created:** [January 15, 1995, 2:13am UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/perceptual-control-association-threecv1-update/8767 "1995-01-15T02:13:58Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Bruce\_Abbott](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/ba8739/32.png) [@Bruce\_Abbott](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/Bruce_Abbott)
#### Post date: [January 15, 1995, 2:13am UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/perceptual-control-association-threecv1-update/8767/1 "1995-01-15T02:13:58Z")

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[From Bruce Abbott (950114.1930 EST)]

Greetings from TROPICAL Fort Wayne! This is totally amazing: walking  
around in the Midwest in mid-January without need of a coat, and the grass  
still green. By gosh, I think I'm going to LIKE global warming . . .

> Bill Powers (950114.0750 MST) --

> On Habits:
> 
> The main thing to remember about complex habits is that they are  
> sequences of controlled perceptions, not sequences of actions. They  
> therefore result from turning on a reference signal that specifies a  
> familiar sequence of perceptions. What repeats at that level of  
> perception usually requires reference signals and perceptions at lower  
> levels that do NOT repeat, because the environment is never the same  
> twice. When you found yourself "making a pot of coffee," were the  
> filters exactly where they were before, did you peel one off the stack  
> (the same filter?) using exactly the same muscle tensions, finger  
> positions, arm positions, and body orientation that you used the last  
> time? If somehow you had been able to record the signals entering your  
> muscles the last time you did this, and played them back into the  
> muscles with complete accuracy, do you think the result would have been  
> a new pot of coffee? Did you, perchance, have to pour out the old coffee  
> and rinse the pot before starting the new pot?

I tried to make it clear that I was speaking of controlled perceptions. In  
my post I wrote:

> Which brings me to a question: what role should association play in PCT?  
> Obviously the traditional notion of skilled execution as a stimulus-response  
> chain won't wash, but it seems to me that realization of one goal in a

sequence

> of goals that must be accomplished could be the "switch" that passes

control to

> the next control system in the sequence.

"Realization of one goal" equals bringing the perception under control by  
that system to its reference level. You suggest that the program-level  
control system switches on the next lower-level system in the "program" by  
raising its reference level. What I am asking is whether you see any use  
for associative principles to account for the "construction" of such  
sequences. I'll try to develop this idea further by elaborating my example.

When I left my office to get that coffee cup, I had a high-level goal  
consciously in mind (if getting rewarmed coffee can be called high level),  
one that required my to accomplish a series of subgoals: getting out of my  
chair, turning toward the door, moving to the next room, and so on. There  
may in fact have been several ways I could have accomplished each of these  
goals (I could have skipped into the next room rather than walking, for  
example). As you so nicely pointed out, I am not really planning a set of  
movements but rather a series of perceptions. Now, how is it that the  
program control level "chooses" one set of subgoals over another, perhaps  
equally feasible set? At times we may be consciously aware of debating  
alternatives and choosing among them; at other times we just "mindlessly"  
let the lower-level control systems pick. Some things have been done so  
often they have become habits and we can go through the whole series without  
much conscious thought. Walter Schneider likes to distinguish those things  
requiring conscious intervention from those which have become habitual as  
"controlled" versus "automatic" processes. The choice of the term  
"controlled" is unfortunate; what he really means is that some processes  
involve higher-level ("conscious") control systems than do others.

This higher-level control system appears able to create a novel sequence of  
subgoals denovo in order to being about some higher goal. It would seem that  
by consciously repeating that sequence, we gradually lay down a pattern, not  
of behaviors, but of goals to be accomplished in some fixed sequence, which  
in effect "trains" the correct reference output sequence into the  
program-level control system. An interesting question for PCT, it seems to  
me, is how this sequence gets organized. When we learn a habit, are we in  
some way laying down a set of associative connections such that the  
achievement of one perceptual goal triggers the raising of the next  
reference level?

I realize that in asking this question I am probably getting far ahead of  
the data; I'm mainly interested in whether you see the concept of  
association as at all useful. There's plenty of evidence that memory is  
associative in the purely descriptive meaning of the term, and it may well  
be that, like S-R, the appearances are deceiving. Still, there must be SOME  
mechanism at work to provide the appearances, and I'd be interested in your  
thoughts on the matter.

THREECV1 UPDATE

I've revised THREECV1 so as to write the collected data to a file, and have  
moved the PCT analysis stuff into a separate program that reads the data  
file. This way, I can give a copy of the data to any of my colleagues who  
wish to try their hand at a conventional analysis.

The revised THREECV1 examines the current default directory for a data file  
called PCTDATA.000; finding none, it uses this as the filename. If such a  
file exists, it increments the extension to 001 and repeats the sequence;  
this process continues until a unique filename is found. This scheme allows  
the program to create 1000 uniquely-named files before it fails, which  
should be more than adequate. I'm planning to put THREECV1 on our Neff\_Labs  
server and have my statistics classes generate some data, which will be  
saved to the server's hard disk. (I already have a reaction-time program  
installed there that saves data in this way.)

The data files are ascii so that they can be easily imported into various  
statistical packages or otherwise manipulated. A data file contains seven  
values per line (three disturbances, three cursor positions, and the mouse  
position) and 3600 lines, so these are fairly large files. I discovered  
that Minitab as configured for my PC ran out of room after reading 2370 rows  
and refused to read the rest. Even then, I had to delete some variables  
while analyzing others because there was insufficient workspace for the  
calculations unless I did so.

One way to shrink the files would be to eliminate saving the three cursor  
positions, as these can be reconstructed from the mouse position and  
disturbances. Do you think this would be a problem? Would it be better to  
omit the disturbances and keep the cursor positions? What I'm concerned  
about is not giving my colleagues a data set that suggests a particular way  
of approaching the analysis.

In taking a look at my own data via Minitab (the portion that loaded), my  
performance seems fairly typical. The correlations between disturbance and  
mouse position were -.033, -.040, and -.992. Guess which cursor I was  
controlling? The correlations between cursor position and mouse position  
were .727, -.358, and .133. Correlating disturbance 3 at lag 10 with mouse  
position raised the correlation from -.992 to -.996, suggesting that my  
control lag was about 10/60 or 1/6 second, if I understand the time units  
correctly.

Tom Bourbon [950112.1607] mentioned to Martin Taylor the possibility of  
using a routine to mark a portion of his data from a run for separate  
analysis; this is easy to do with the THREECV1 ascii files: just cut and paste.

I still have a bit of work to do to "clean up" the revised programs; I'll  
post them when they seem to be in good order.

Are we having fun yet?

Bruce