Donald A. Norman & Tim Shallice (1986), “Attention to Action: Willed and
Automatic Control of Behavior”, in R. J. Davidson, G. E. Schwartz & D. Shapiro
(eds.), Consciousness and Self-Regulation: Advances in Research and Theory,
vol. 4, New York: Plenum, pp. 1–18 — DOI-10.1007/978-1-4757-0629-1_1.
Crossref gives only the year, so published: carries it as the first of
January. Crossref’s chapter title is “Attention to Action” alone. The
subtitle is the 1980 report’s, and is used here because the standard
citation of the chapter carries it. Whether the printed chapter carries it
was not checked.
An earlier version was issued in December 1980 as CHIP Report 99, Center for Human Information Processing, University of California, San Diego. ERIC catalogues it as ED205562, “Technical Report No. 8006”, 43 pages, sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and NIMH. This entry is for the 1986 chapter, the version with a DOI. The report is the same argument in an earlier form, and it is not filed separately.
Key takeaways
Registered from the ERIC abstract of the 1980 report, not a reading of either version. The abstract, in part:
- “The major theme of the paper is that the primary role of attention is in the control of action.” Action sequences “can run themselves off, efficiently, smoothly, without any need for deliberate attention”. When a plan must be modified, a novel sequence followed, or “some habitual act” prevented, “it is necessary to insert deliberate attentional intervention”.
- “Most attentional conflicts occur with the initiation rather than the execution of actions.”
- “Two levels of control are suggested: a contention scheduling mechanism that selects from among competing schemas; and a supervisory attentional mechanism that biases the selection process.” The supervisory system is required “where the action sequences are ill-learned or novel, where the action is highly critical or dangerous, or where planning is required”.
- “The result is three modes of the control of performance: automatic, contention scheduling without deliberate direction, and deliberate conscious control. Will becomes the application of attentional resources to the control of action.”
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, for the record’s coverage of willed and automatic control. It is the classic statement of a supervisory system set over a field of competing action schemas.
That makes it the older counterpart to the dual-process accounts that Frijda (LIT-540) and THEORY-056 argue against, and the ancestor of the controlled/automatic distinction that Shenhav, Botvinick and Cohen (LIT-585) formalize. Its lower level, contention scheduling among schemas, is control without a controller, the architecture Brooks (LIT-436) built. The open question for THEORY-056 is whether the supervisory level is a regulator of a different kind, or one more competitor that biases the contest. The abstract’s word “biases” leaves that open. Only a reading can answer it.
Priority for a reading: high for THEORY-056 and for the record’s account of will.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.