*** Save the date: Winter School "Human Action Control" organized by Markus Janczyk takes place from 13th-16th 2017 at the Department of Psychology in Tübingen. More information will be provided as soon as possible here ***

Research focus:

The main research interest of my group is on the interplay of perception and action. Trivially, one cannot act without perceiving the environement; likewise, it is certainly helpful to perceive whether an action gave rise to the desired changes in the environment. That said, both aspects may in fact be more interwoven than becomes evident at first sight. One particularly influential framework is the Ideomotor Theory (dating back to 19th century philosophers such as Emil Harleß and also William James) ascribing to the action effects an important and generative role in selecting/initiating an action. I currently focus on the role of such action effects for dual-task performance.

A second pillar of my research is the Perception-Action Model proposed by Milner and Goodale. Here I mostly focus on the role of (nominally) task-irrelevant variations of grasp-able stimulus objects. Further, I investigate whether skilled, right-handed grasping plays a special role compared to other grip types, such as left-handed, unskilled, transformed, ... grasping.

Finally, I am interested in the interplay of attention and working memory, in particular how attention operates to select working memory content and what happens to such content when the focus of attention moves to another item.