The TRACE workshop brings together a vivid mixture of scientific disciplines concerned with human and animal cognition. It aims to spark discussions on the most fundamental issues in current research, and the 2019 edition of the workshop will feature the issue of Intentionality and Agency.

Both topics are pivotal for understanding how the agents represent, produce, control, and experience their actions and the actions of others. Both topics also come with a considerable research tradition, with intentionality being a core theme of phenomenological accounts in philosophy and anthropology while agency has become a hot topic in psychology and neuroscience in the last two decades. Despite their high relevance for understanding action control, however, there has been limited crosstalk between the relevant communities.

A major aim of this year’s edition is to build bridges between the two fields of intentionality and agency by featuring relevant perspectives from philosophy, psychology, animal biology, and beyond while encouraging contributions also from related fields such as linguistics, cognitive robotics, sociology, anthropology, and ethology. The workshop is open to multi-method perspectives — experimental work, modelling, philosophical inquiry, observation, and linguistic analysis — to allow for a comprehensive take on the topic of human action control. Relevant questions include, but are not limited to the following: How do phenomenological accounts inform basic theories of human action control (and vice versa)? How do social processes affect the representation and control of one’s own actions? Which conditions give rise to feelings of agency and responsibility and, conversely, how does agency affect decision-making and acting? What are the perils and pitfalls of certain lines of inquiry, what are their strengths and merits?

The 2019 edition is the 6^th instantiation of the TRACE workshop. After being held at Paul Valéry University Montpellier (2014 - 2016), Paris Nanterre University (2017), and Free University of Brussels (2018), it will be coming to the University of Würzburg. We especially encourage young researchers — post-doctoral researchers and PhD candidates — to present their work at this stimulating, interdisciplinary meeting.