Andrea Kiesel

University of Freiburg | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg · Institute of Psychology

The literature on action control is rife with differences in terminology. This consensus statement contributes shared definitions for perception-action inte- gration concepts as informed by the framework of event coding.

Humans are remarkably flexible in adapting their behavior to current demands. It has been suggested that the decision which of multiple tasks to perform is based on a variety of factors pertaining to the rewards associated with each task as well as task performance (e.g., error rates associated with each task and/or error commission on the previous...

People can learn to control their thoughts and emotions. The scientific study of control has been conducted mostly independently for cognitive and emotional conflicts. However, recent theoretical proposals suggest a close link between emotional and cognitive control processes. Indeed, mounting evidence from clinical sciences, social and personality...

The Zeitschrift für Psychologie is the oldest psychological journal in Europe and the second oldest in the world. It was founded in 1890 by Hermann Ebbinghaus, Arthur König, and colleagues 3 years after the American Journal of Psychology and is a publication organ for all fields of empirical psychology. Until 2006, it was published in German. In 20...

Recent studies have suggested that abstract control states (i.e., internal attentional states independent from concrete stimuli and responses) can be stored in episodic memory and retrieved subsequently. However, the duration of such a control state memory remains unclear. Previous research has found a quick and complete decay for stimulus-response...

The experiment reported in this article provides a first experimental evaluation of human–machine cooperation on decision level: It explicitly focuses on the interaction of human and machine in cooperative decision-making situations for which a suitable experimental design is introduced. Furthermore, it challenges conventional leader–follower appro...

In the typical Stroop task, participants are presented with color words written in different ink colors and are asked to respond to their color. It has been suggested that the Stroop task consists of two main conflicts: information conflict (color vs. word naming) and task conflict (respond to color vs. read the word). In the current study, we deve...

Curiosity appears to be the driving force for humans to find new information, but despite its general relevance, only a few studies investigated the underlying mechanisms of curiosity. Kang et al. (Psychol Sci 20(8):963–973, 2009) and Dubey and Griffiths (Psychol Rev 127(3):455–476, 2020) reported a relation between curiosity and confidence such th...

The best combination of possible climate policy options (mitigation, adaptation and different climate engineering technologies) to tackle climate change is unknown. Climate policy is facing a hard decision in answering the question whether climate engineering technologies should be researched, limitedly deployed or even deployed at global scale. Su...

p>This article has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems (DOI: 10.1109/THMS.2023.3274916). The experiment reported in this paper provides a first experimental evaluation of human-machine cooperation on decision level: It explicitly focuses on the interaction of human and machine in cooperative decision making s...

Process interference or sharing of attentional resources between cognitive tasks and balance control during upright standing has been well documented. Attentional costs increase with greater balancing demands of a balance activity, for example in standing compared to sitting. The traditional approach for analyzing balance control using posturograph...

This special collection focuses on action control and its two postulated core processes, namely feature binding and retrieval. Action control is an important topic as humans interact with their environment by means of goal-directed behavior, i.e. by means of actions. Cognitive processes were developed and shaped to enhance preparation, execution, a...

How do emotional stimuli change the way we control our behavior? The interaction between emotion and behavior-shaping, cognitive control mechanisms remain little understood in psychological science. The present meta-analysis addresses this controversy by means of a quantitative review. We analyzed data from 71 studies published through December 201...

Previous studies have suggested that people are sensitive to anticipated cognitive processing demands when deciding which task to perform, but the influence of perceptual processing demands on voluntary task choice is still unclear. The present study tested whether voluntary task choice behavior may be influenced by unpredictable task-specific perc...

People can learn to control their thoughts and emotions. The scientific study of control has been conducted mostly independently for cognitive and emotional conflicts. However, recent theoretical proposals suggest a close link between emotional and cognitive control processes. Indeed, mounting evidence from clinical sciences, social and personality...

Recent studies have suggested that abstract control-states (i.e., internal attentional states independent from concrete stimuli and responses) can be stored in episodic memory and retrieved subsequently. However, the duration of such a control-state memory remains unclear. Previous research has found a quick and complete decay for stimulus-response...

An important challenge of automated vehicles (AV) will be the cooperative interaction with surrounding road users such as pedestrians. One solution to compensate for the missing driver-pedestrian interaction might be explicit communication via external human machine interfaces (eHMIs). Additionally, implicit communication such as a vehicle pitch mo...

One major challenge of the 21st century is the increasingly rapid development of new technologies and their evaluation. In this article we argue for an interdisciplinary approach to meet this demand for evaluating new and specifically bioinspired technologies. We combine the consideration of normative principles in the field of ethics with psycholo...

Cognitive control theories describe the active maintenance of goal representations over temporal delays as central for adaptive behavior. Dynamic adaptations of goal representations are often measured as the congruency sequence effect (CSE), which describes a reduced congruency effect in trials following incongruent trials compared to congruent tri...

Humans can intentionally forget previously-learned declarative information such as words: Memory for to-be-remembered (TBR) words is typically better than for to-be-forgotten (TBF) ones (directed forgetting effect). The role of intention in the learning and retrieval of procedural bindings is, however, less clear. Here, we combined item-method dire...

When the duration of a pre-target interval probabilistically predicts the identity of the target, participants typically form time-based expectancies: they respond faster to frequent interval-target combinations than to infrequent ones. Yet, previous research investigating the cognitive time-processing mechanisms underlying time-based expectancy as...

The notion of symbiosis has been increasingly mentioned in research on physically coupled human-machine systems. Yet, a uniform specification on which aspects constitute human-machine symbiosis is missing. By combining the expertise of different disciplines, we elaborate on a multivariate perspective of symbiosis as the highest form of interaction...

Realistische Erwartungen und Passung zwischen Interessen und Studieninhalten sind zentrale Ansatzpunkte bei der Steuerung von Studienwahlentscheidungen. In einem neu entwickelten fachspezifischen Erwartungs- und Interessenstest (E × I - Test) für Psychologie werden erstmals Erwartungsdiskrepanzen und Interessen kombiniert betrachtet und dementsprec...

According to recent theorizing, cognitive control and affective processing are closely linked. Specifically, it has been suggested that negative affect acts as a driving force for attentional adjustment. Empirical support comes from a study by van Steenbergen et al. (Psychol Sci 20:1473–1477, 2009) demonstrating that negative stimuli increase the c...

It has been recently suggested that research on human multitasking is best organized according to three research perspectives, which differ in their focus on cognitive structure, flexibility, and plasticity. Even though it is argued that the perspectives should be seen as complementary, there has not been a formal approach describing or explaining...

The temporal predictability of upcoming events plays a crucial role in the adjustment of anticipatory cognitive control in multitasking. Previous research has demonstrated that task switching performance improved if tasks were validly predictable by a pre-target interval. Hence, far, the underlying cognitive processes of time-based task expectancy...

Human behavior is guided by prior experience such as bindings between stimuli and responses. Experimentally, this is evident in performance changes when features of the stimulus-response episode reoccur either in the short-term or in the long-term. So far, effects of short-term and long-term bindings are assumed to be independent from one another....

Theoretical accounts of self-representation assume a privileged role for information that is linked to the self and suggest that self-relevant stimuli capture attention in a seemingly obligatory manner. However, attention is not only biased towards self-relevant information, but self-relevant information might also tune attention more broadly, for...

Humans are remarkably flexible in adapting their behavior to current demands. It has been suggested that the decision which of multiple tasks to perform is based on a variety of factors pertaining to the costs and benefits associated with a task. However, further empirical investigation is needed to examine how cognitive costs associated with task...

Humans are able to intentionally forget declarative memory content as demonstrated in directed-forgetting (DF) experiments. Yet, only few studies assessed whether DF affects associations in procedural memory. We tested how the intention to remember/forget a stimulus affected the formation and/or retrieval of stimulus-response (S-R) associations. To...

Humans adjust their behavior after they have committed an error, but it is unclear whether and how error commissions influence voluntary task choices. In the present article, we review different accounts on effects of errors in the previous trial (transient error effects) and overall error probabilities (sustained error effects) on behavioral adapt...

One of the recent major advances in cognitive psychology research has been the option of web-based in addition to lab-based experimental research. This option fosters experimental research by increasing the pace and size of collecting data sets. Importantly, web-based research profits heavily from integrating tasks that are frequently applied in co...

The number of automated vehicles (AVs) is expected to successively increase in the near future. This development has a considerable impact on the informal communication between AVs and pedestrians. Informal communication with the driver will become obsolete during the interaction with AVs. Literature suggests that external human machine interfaces...

Nowadays there is consensus that stimulus and response features are partially represented in the same coding format furthering the binding of these features into event files. If some or all features comprised in an event file repeat later, the whole file can be retrieved thereby modulating ongoing performance (leading to so-called stimulus-response...

Standing compared to sitting, for instance at work, is associated with positive physical and mental health consequences. Indeed, studies suggest that performance in cognitive conflict tasks (e.g., Color Stroop tasks) is improved when subjects perform the task while standing compared to sitting (Rosenbaum et al., 2018; Smith et al., 2019). However,...

In the Anthropocene, mankind is facing enormous challenges. Science and technology obviously have an essential role to play in addressing these challenges but have to be supplemented by the collaboration of different actors from the scientific and non-scientific community. Possibly beneficial technologies can only unfold their full potential if the...

We introduce cognitive-affective maps (CAMs) as a novel tool to assess individual experiences and belief systems. CAMs were first presented by the cognitive scientist and philosopher Paul Thagard as a graphical representation of a mental network, visualizing attitudes, thoughts, and affective connotations toward the topic of interest. While CAMs we...

When our actions yield predictable consequences in the environment, our eyes often already saccade towards the locations we expect these consequences to appear at. Such spontaneous anticipatory saccades occur based on bi-directional associations between action and effect formed by prior experience. That is, our eye movements are guided by expectati...

In response-interference tasks, congruency effects are reduced in trials that follow an incongruent trial. This congruence sequence effect (CSE) has been taken to reflect top-down cognitive control processes that monitor for and intervene in case of conflict. In contrast, episodic-memory accounts explain CSEs with bottom-up retrieval of stimulus-re...

The notion of symbiosis has been increasingly mentioned in research on physically coupled human-machine systems. Yet, a uniform specification on which aspects constitute human-machine symbiosis is missing. By combining the expertise of different disciplines, we elaborate on a multivariate perspective of symbiosis as the highest form of physically c...

A bstract We introduce cognitive-affective maps (CAMs) as a novel tool to assess individual experiences and belief systems. CAMs were first presented by the cognitive scientist and philosopher Paul Thagard as a graphical representation of a mental network, visualizing attitudes, thoughts, and affective connotations toward the topic of interest. Whi...

Curiosity appears to be the driving force for humans to find new information, but despite its general relevance, only few studies investigated the underlying mechanisms of curiosity. Kang et al. (2009) reported that curiosity follows an inverted U-shaped function of confidence, with highest curiosity on moderate confidence levels of knowing informa...

Emotional information receives prioritized processing over concurrent cognitive processes. This can lead to distraction if emotional information has to be ignored. In the cognitive domain, mechanisms have been described that allow control of (cognitive) distractions. However, whether similar cognitive control mechanisms also can attenuate emotional...

The self-organized task switching paradigm enables to investigate the link between task performance and task selection in a voluntary task switching setting that benefits task switches over task repetitions. For example, waiting for a repetition-related stimulus onset denotes environmental costs, which are balanced with internal task-switch costs....

The experiment reported in this paper provides a first experimental evaluation of human-machine cooperation on decision level: It explicitly focuses on the interaction of human and machine in cooperative decision making situations for which a suitable experimental design is introduced. Furthermore, it challenges conventional leader-follower approac...

The experiment reported in this paper provides a first experimental evaluation of human-machine cooperation on decision level: It explicitly focuses on the interaction of human and machine in cooperative decision making situations for which a suitable experimental design is introduced. Furthermore, it challenges conventional leader-follower approac...

External human machine interfaces (eHMI) might contribute to an enhanced traffic flow and road safety by providing relevant information to surrounding road users. To quantify the effect of eHMI on traffic flow, the majority of studies required participants to indicate their crossing decision in an explicit manner, such as pressing a button. While t...

Humans adjust their behavior after they committed an error, but it is unclear whether and how error commissions influence voluntary task choices. In the present article, we review different accounts on effects of errors in the previous trial (transient error effects) and overall error probabilities (sustained error effects) on behavioral adaptation...

Mediation is a method for conflict resolution in which an impartial mediator reconciles the conflicting parties by fostering mutual understanding. A Cognitive-Affective Map (CAM) is a novel concept graph that is able to represent cognitions and affects of somebody’s point of view. CAMedaid is a portmanteau consisting of the words CAM, (to) mediate...

One of the recent major advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience research has been the option of web-based in addition to lab-based experimental research. This option fosters experimental research by increasing the pace and size of collecting data sets. Importantly, web-based research profits heavily from integrating tasks that are frequen...

We tested a novel method for studying human experience (thoughts and affect). We utilized Cognitive-Affective Maps (CAMs)–an approach to visually represent thoughts and their affective connotations as networks of concepts that individuals associate with a given event. Using an innovative software tool, we recruited a comparative sample of (n = 93)...

In response to the corona pandemic, many leisure activities have been restricted while walking has been explicitly endorsed by health authorities. We investigated how leisure walking affects individuals' attitudes to the pandemic. We used Cognitive‐Affective Maps (CAMs) to measure individual's cognitive and affective attitudes toward the corona pan...

Recent research has shown that humans are able to implicitly adapt to time-transition contingencies in a task-switching paradigm, indicated by better performance in trials where the task transition (switch vs. repetition) is validly predicted by the pre-target interval compared to trials with invalidly predicted transitions. As participants switche...

In interference tasks, the magnitude of the congruency effect is reduced in trials that follow an incongruent trial. This congruence sequence effect (CSE) reflects cognitive control processes, yet accounts disagree when and how control is exerted. Here, we address these questions in the context of the prime-target task. In this task, control can ei...

item-specific priming

Dual-tasking often requires prioritizing one task over the other. For example, in the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, participants are instructed to initially respond to Task 1 (T1) and only then to Task 2 (T2). Furthermore, in the prioritized processing paradigm (PP), participants are instructed to perform T2 only if T1 was a no-go...

The Anthropocene is the new geological epoch, characterized by the accelerating global influence of humankind and the impending point of no return on environmental changes. In this article, we highlight reactions of scientists to the challenges of the Anthropocene from the perspectives of biomimetics and sustainability research. To answer novel que...

Previous studies on voluntary task switching using the self-organized task switching paradigm suggest that task performance and task selection in multitasking are related. When deciding between two tasks, the stimulus associated with a task repetition occurred with a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) that continuously increased with the number of rep...

The Anthropocene is the new geological epoch, characterized by the accelerating global influence of humankind and the impending point of no return on environmental changes. In this article, we highlight reactions of scientists to the challenges of the Anthropocene from the perspectives of biomimetics and sustainability research. To answer novel que...

Stimulus-response (S-R) associations consist of two independent components: Stimulus-classification (S-C) and stimulus-action (S-A) associations. Here, we examined whether these S-C and S-A associations were modulated by cognitive control operations. In two item-specific priming experiments, we systematically manipulated the proportion of trials in...

We investigated how people balance cognitive constraints (switch costs) against environmental constraints (stimulus availabilities) to optimize their voluntary task switching performance and explored individual differences in their switching behaviour. Specifically, in a self-organized task-switching environment, the stimulus needed for a task repe...

Advanced driver assistance systems can effectively support drivers but can also induce unwanted effects in behavior. The present study investigates this adverse behavioral adaptation in adaptive Forward Collision Warning (FCW) systems. Other than conventional FCW systems that provide warnings based on static Time-To-Collision (TTC) thresholds, adap...

Humans form associations between time intervals and subsequent events and thus develop time-based expectancies that enable time-based action preparation. For instance, when each of two foreperiods (short vs. long) is frequently paired with one specific task (e.g., number magnitude judgement vs. number parity judgement) and infrequently with the alt...

Recent studies in the field of task switching have shown that humans can base expectancies for tasks on temporal cues. When tasks are predictable based on the duration of the preceding pre-target interval, humans implicitly adapt to this predictability, indicated by better performance in trials with validly compared to invalidly predicted tasks. Ye...

When our actions yield predictable consequences in the environment, our eyes often already saccade towards the locations we expect these consequences to appear at. Such spontaneous anticipatory saccades occur based on bi-directional associations between action and effect formed by prior experience. That is, our eye movements are guided by expectati...

Skilled performance is traditionally thought to develop via overt practice. Recent research has demonstrated that merely instructed stimulus-response (S-R) bindings can influence later performance and readily transfer across response modalities. In the present study, we extended this to include instructed category-response (C-R) associations. That...

We execute most of our movements in order to elicit an intended effect. This kind of intentionality is commonly assumed to drive a temporal illusion, referred to as Intentional Binding (IB): Stimuli intentionally elicited by one’s own action (i.e., effects) are perceived as temporally earlier compared to unintentionally occurring stimuli (not elici...

Human action control relies on representations that integrate perception and action, but the relevant research is scattered over various experimental paradigms and the theorizing is overly paradigm-specific. To overcome this obstacle we propose BRAC (binding and retrieval in action control), an overarching, integrative framework that accounts for a...

Zusammenfassung. Die Kognitionspsychologische Grundlagenforschung zur Handlungskontrolle hat inzwischen eine große Zahl sehr spezifischer Aspekte von Handlungen in diversen Experimentalparadigmen isoliert und beleuchtet, sodass der gegenwärtige Forschungsstand durch eine kaum übersehbare Flut unverbundener Phänomene und paradigmen-spezifischer Mode...

A central function of the human brain is prediction. Influential theoretical views suggest that we form predictions about forthcoming sensory outcomes that follow from our own actions and that anticipation of these outcomes is fundamental for action control. However little is known about how predicted outcomes are represented at the neural level. W...

The present study, for the first time, investigated the influence of time delays and the spatial arrangement of products on the quality rating of wine bottles in an online wine shop. For this purpose, an online shop was simulated in which participants selected various wine bottles from an overview page. After participants had selected a wine bottle...

Intentional Binding (IB) refers to the phenomenon that we perceive effects we caused by a voluntary action earlier compared to stimuli we did not cause by our action. Although IB has been investigated in numerous studies and is routinely employed as an implicit measure for Sense of Agency, its underlying mechanisms are not yet clear. We investigate...

Today, societal discourse often lags behind technological advance (e.g. autonomous driving, genetics). To initiate the social discourse already at an early stage of the technological development program of the Freiburg Cluster of Excellence Living, Adaptive and Energyautonomous Materials Systems (livMatS), we aim for a new approach that enables pre...

Emotional information captures attention due to privileged processing. Consequently, performance in cognitive tasks declines (i.e., emotional distraction, ED). Therefore, shielding current goals from ED is essential for adaptive goal-directed- behavior. It has been shown that ED is reduced when participants recruit cognitive control before or after...

Conflict monitoring theory proposes that conflict between incompatible responses is registered by a dedicated monitoring system and that this conflict signal triggers changes of attentional filters and adapts control processes according to current task demands. Extending the conflict monitoring theory, it has been suggested that conflict elicits a...

Findings from studies using the voluntary task switching (VTS) paradigm (Arrington & Logan, 2004) suggest that task selection in multitasking can be influenced by both cognitive and environmental constraints. In the present study, we used an adaptive VTS paradigm to directly test whether and how people adapt to these 2 constraints when they are ins...

How do we manage to shield our goals against distraction? Traditionally, this ability has been attributed to top-down cognitive control, which is assumed to monitor for, and intervene in case of response conflicts. However, this account has been challenged by episodic-retrieval views, which attribute sequential modulations of conflict effects to bo...

The notion that impaired performance in the past increases motivational vigor in the future is central to many modern theories. The conflict monitoring model predicts that conflict between incompatible responses reduces susceptibility to upcoming conflict. Recently, this conflict-adaptation effect has been reframed in terms of motivational control:...

The present study tested whether the coupling of covert attentional shifts and motor planning of pointing movements can be modulated by learning. Participants performed two tasks. As a primary movement task, they executed a pointing movement to a movement target (MT) location. As a secondary visual attention task, they identified a discrimination t...

Congruency effects diminish in contexts associated with mostly incongruent trials compared with contexts associated with mostly congruent trials. Here, we aimed to assess affective influences on this context-specific proportion congruent (CSPC) effect. We presented either neutral or affective faces as context stimuli in a Flanker task and associate...

Telling a consistent lie across multiple occasions poses severe demands on memory. Two cognitive mechanisms aid with overcoming this difficulty: Associations between a question and its corresponding response and associations between a question and its previous intentional context (in this case: honest vs. dishonest responding). Here, we assessed wh...

An action that produced an effect is perceived later in time compared to an action that did not produce an effect. Likewise, the effect of an action is perceived earlier in time compared to a stimulus that was not produced by an action. Despite numerous studies on this phenomenon—referred to as Intentional Binding effect (IB)—the underlying mechani...

Responding to stimuli leads to the formation of stimulus-response (S-R) associations that allow stimuli to subsequently automatically trigger associated responses. A recent study has shown that S-R associations are not only established by active task execution, but also by the simultaneous presentation of stimuli and verbal codes denoting responses...

Previous research has shown that stimulus-response associations comprise associations between the stimulus and the task (a classification task in particular) and the stimulus and the action performed as a response. These associations, contributing to the phenomenon of priming, affect behaviour after a delay of hundreds of trials and they are resist...