The Winter School "Human Action Control" organized by Markus Janczyk took place from 13th-16th February 2017 at the Department of Psychology in Tübingen.

For some information and impressions, please see here

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Research Interests:

From the perspective of cognitive psychology, the research we pursue in our group focuses on mainly three different topics that cover the fields of perception and action, memory, and language. Results from these lines of research are also considered with regard to human factors and human-computer interaction. Finally, we address statistical questions of relevance to quantitative analyses in experimental research. For more detailled information on the research and resulting publications, please see here.

• The Interplay of Perception and Action: Trivially, one cannot act without perceiving the environment; 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 Johann Friedrich Herbart, Emil Harleß, and also William James) ascribing to the consequences on an action (the action effects) an important and generative role in selecting/initiating an action. Beyond addressing basic research in this field, we focus on the role of action effects for dual-task performance, and apply the principles to applied questions such as using gestures to interact with machines. A second pillar of this research line is the Perception-Action Model proposed by Milner and Goodale, where we focus on the role of (nominally) task-irrelevant variations of grasp-able stimulus objects for skilled, right-handed grasping but also for left-handed, unskilled, transformed, ... grasping.
• (Working) Memory and Attention: In this field we first investigate attentional selection of items within working memory. Current theories offer integrations of declarative and procedural working memory, and our research investigates the demands to select one particular item and its interplay with concurrently selecting a response. In a second line of research we are interested in the role of language production modality (oral vs. written) for retrieving long-term memory content.
• Temporal processing of presuppositions: Here we investige how presuppositional information provided by a speaker is processed by a listender during the online construction of a sentence’s meaning. This project is part of the collaborative research center (SFB) 833 (project B2) and is pursued in cooperation with linguists. We develop Bayesian models of meaning construction, and the models' predictions are tested by using mouse movements as a method to gather fine-grained online data.