FOR 2790:  Binding and Retrieval in Action Control

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 393269228

Basic processes of human action control have been studied in Cognitive Psychology with different paradigms (e.g., paradigms eliciting task switching costs, negative priming effects, or sequential conflict effects). Each of these paradigms has generated a wealth of findings and insights. Research with these paradigms, however, has typically developed separately and in isolation, with each paradigm being assumed to address a different and potentially unique facet of action control (e.g., cognitive flexibility, inhibition, cognitive control). Recently, however, episodic Stimulus-Response (S-R) binding and retrieval have been proposed as a unitary framework that can explain effects across various action control paradigms (e.g., Hommel, 2016; Schmidt et al., 2016). Capitalizing on the enormous potential inherent in this unifying approach, we developed a framework that structures and simplifies the vast amount of accessible data on action control, and that also serves as a basis to generate novel hypotheses and predictions in the area of action control and beyond. In particular, the framework on action control can be used to describe related psychological phenomena from other research areas (e.g., perception, attention, learning, memory, motivation, emotion, language) in terms of binding and retrieval mechanisms. While extending the reach of the framework is a main goal of this Research Unit’s second phase, at the same time, the scope of the framework has to be defined and clarified and its unique contribution to human behavior has to be separated from other mechanisms that also play a role in action control (e.g., priming or inhibition). To further understand the processes underlying the framework a neurophysiological approach supplements behavioral paradigms.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• A binding perspective on task and language switching: Exploring the influence of a task-irrelevant context on episodic retrieval (Applicant Philipp, Andrea M. )
• Binding for Action Slips: Internal Structure and Generalizability (Applicants Foerster, Anna ;  Moeller, Birte )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Frings, Christian )
• Event Organization Within and Beyond Event Files (Applicant Mayr, Susanne )
• Feature (Un)Binding and Retrieval in Action Discarding (Applicant Kunde, Wilfried )
• Gating features into actions II (Applicant Frings, Christian )
• How Binding and Retrieval of Control-States Supports Cognitive Control (Applicant Dignath, David )
• Stimulus-Response bindings and their relation to social learning (Applicant Giesen, Carina )
• The causal functional role of action-effect bindings: An electrophysiological and brain stimulation analysis (Applicant Beste, Christian )
• The role of stimulus-response binding and retrieval in instrumental learning (Applicant Rothermund, Klaus )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Christian Frings