Research

Humans have remarkable abilities for goal-directed action. We set goals, plan ahead and act accordingly. Sometimes however, habits and impulses can be powerful distractors and additional efforts are required to ensure successful goal pursuit. It has been suggested that our cognitive system solves this problem by means of dedicated control mechanisms that guide and supervise goal-directed actions.

In the Action Control Lab, we seek to understand these control mechanisms and how they operate. Although people rely on their abilities to control their actions every day, fundamental knowledge about underlying psychological mechanisms is still limited. Such knowledge is important not only for cognitive psychologists, but also for researchers and practitioners in neuroscience, philosophy and clinical sciences.

Perhaps the importance of control becomes most obvious when it fails. We experience this in our everyday life, e.g., when pressing the wrong key on our mobile phone. Chronic control deficits occur in many psychiatric disorders. In the long run, a better understanding of cognitive control may help to prevent many mundane action slips, e.g., through research-informed development of adequate user-centred interface designs, and may also facilitate a more specific diagnosis and treatment of enduring control deficits in clinically affected people.

Because action control is a multifaceted construct, we adopt an integrative perspective that links findings from perception, attention, memory and decision-making. Furthermore, because many of our actions are highly contextualised, we investigate also how social, motivational and emotional contexts affect action control. We address these questions through carefully controlled experiments, mostly studying behavioural data (e.g., reaction time paradigms, psychophysics, decision making tasks, recording of continuous movement trajectories and eye tracking) in combination with appropriate physiological measures (e.g., EEG, EMG, ECG, SCR).

When control fails – How to adapt actions and attention in case of difficulties?

In many cases, effect-based control ensures successful goal pursuit. But what happens when our actions fail to produce the intended outcomes? Oftentimes, we need additional effort to overcome obstacles that hinder goal attainment. How do we adjust our actions in response to such distractions?

Distractions not only impair performance, but might also have a signalling function indicating the need for additional control. This hypothesis has received support from studies showing that errors and conflict (i.e., situations in which correct and erroneous responses compete) are automatically registered by dedicated monitoring mechanisms. In addition, it has been proposed that monitored errors or conflicts serve as a learning signal for subsequent control adjustments. This allows a more efficient rejection of distractors and strengthens the selection of goal-relevant information.

Consider a situation in which you are driving a car through a construction site. Registration of small dips in performance should ´teach´ control mechanisms of the driver that increase attentional focus, helping to stay in lane and adjust the speed accordingly. From this perspective, control operates likes a cybernetic feedback loop, in which errors and conflicts dynamically update control settings. But what happens, if we drive through the same construction site every day? Wouldn't it be more efficient, if the appropriate level of control could be directly reactivated? To address this question, we investigate how abstract control states, i.e., snap shots of current attentional states, are stored in memory and retrieved later on. Our previous findings have suggested that that memory aids control operations by automatizing and tailoring them to situational circumstances.

Although there is agreement that errors and conflicts are quickly monitored, it is less clear which features of the monitored events cause subsequent control adjustments. It has been proposed that emotional responses to errors and conflict could be the driving force of control adjustments. We investigate this hypothesis and ask whether errors and conflict elicit emotional responses and how emotions guide control. In previous studies, we found that conflict and errors elicit negative affect and engage motivational systems that facilitate avoidance. Preliminary evidence points towards a direct link between the strength of emotional/motivational engagement and the strength of control adjustment.

Because of their signalling effect, errors and conflict help us shield against distractors. While a narrow attentional focus is appropriate in many difficult situations, there are cases in which more flexible behaviour is needed. For instance, the ability to block off additional input is beneficial while driving through a construction site, but clearly detrimental when expecting a phone call at work. In such situations, flexible switching back and forth between different tasks is required. We investigate these situations in our research on multitasking. Initial results suggest that errors and conflict can facilitate disengagement from the current task, thereby making people more flexible to switch to the alternative task. In our view, these findings emphasise the context-dependency of cognitive control. On the one hand, errors and conflicts signal the need for more stability (shielding against distraction) in single-tasking. Here, control mechanisms can optimise how a task is performed. On the other hand, errors and conflicts signal the need for more flexibility (switching between tasks) in multitasking where control mechanisms can optimise which task is selected.

Selected publications: