Research Interests
My research focus is on the conscious control of skilled mental activity, and how control and experience change with increasing skill. This research is guided by a theory of consciousness described in my book Experienced Cognition (1997). My students and I study the fine-grained structure of deliberate control in complex tasks such as symbolic and spatial problem solving and reasoning. We are currently developing a model of the time course of deliberate control, tracing the evolution of goal representations in stages: plan, intention, procedure, outcome representation. These stages occur at each step of complex mental activity, on a time scale of a second or so. The model emphasizes the importance of processes for coordination, placekeeping, and monitoring.
Recent empirical work emphasizes the roles of temporal synchronization
and externalizing strategies (such as pointing while counting) in achieving
deliberate control of fluent mental activities. Our college-student participants
find tasks such as counting on-screen events and performing running arithmetic
quite challenging, despite the highly-skilled nature of the component
skills for these tasks. Such tasks therefore provide rich paradigms for
understanding control, and for developing a theory of deliberate control.
Recent Publications
Sohn, M.-H. & Carlson, R.A. (2003). Implicit temporal tuning of working memory strategy during cognitive skill acquisition. American Journal of Psychology, 116, 239-256.
Avraamides, M.N. & Carlson, R.A. (2003). Egocentric organization of spatial activities in imagined navigation. Memory & Cognition, 31, 252-261.
Carlson, R.A. (2003). Skill learning. In The Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Macmillan Reference Ltd.
Carlson, R.A. & Stevenson, L.M. (2002). Temporal tuning in the acquisition of cognitive skill. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 759-765.
Carlson, R.A. (2002). Conscious intentions in the control of skilled mental activity. In B. Ross (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Vol. 41, pp. 191-228). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Cary, M. & Carlson, R.A. (2001). Distributing working memory resources in problem solving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 836-848.
Carlson, R.A. (1999). Implicit representation, mental states, and explication processes. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 761-762.
Cary, M. & Carlson, R.A. (1999). External support and the development of problem solving routines. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 1053-1070.
Carlson, R.A. (1999). Consciousness and agency: Explaining what and explaining who. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 148-149.
Sohn, M-H. & Carlson, R.A. (1998). Procedural frameworks for simple arithmetic skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 1052-1067.
Carlson, R.A. (1997). Experienced Cognition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
