Christina U Pfeuffer

Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (KU) | KU

According to ideomotor theory, human action control employs anticipations of one´s own actions´ future consequences, that is, action effect anticipations, as a means of triggering actions that will produce desired outcomes (e.g., Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001). Using the response-effect compatibility paradigm (Kunde, 2001), we demon...

Research on stimulus-response (S-R) associations as the basis of behavioral automaticity has a long history. Traditionally, it was assumed that S-R associations are formed as a consequence of the (repeated) co-occurrence of stimulus and response, that is, when participants act upon stimuli. Here, we demonstrate that S-R associations can also be est...

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...

When an action contingently yields a predictable effect, we form bi-directional action-effect associations that allow us to anticipate both the location and timing of our actions' effects. This is evident in anticipatory eye movements towards the future effect's location which are performed earlier when the effect's delay is short rather than long....

Across disciplines, researchers increasingly recognize that open science and reproducible research practices may accelerate scientific progress by allowing others to reuse research outputs and by promoting rigorous research that is more likely to yield trustworthy results. While initiatives, training programs, and funder policies encourage research...

In this study, we investigated whether pictures of natural hazards (i.e., climate change consequences) elicit automatic (negative) affective responses using a picture-word interference task. In picture-word interference tasks, affective pictures and words are paired such that picture valence and word valence match (congruent) or mismatch (incongrue...

Reproducible research and open science practices have the potential to accelerate scientific progress by allowing others to reuse research outputs, and by promoting rigorous research that is more likely to yield trustworthy results. However, these practices are uncommon in many fields, so there is a clear need for training that helps and encourages...

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 an action contingently yields a predictable effect, we form bi-directional action-effect associations that allow us to anticipate both the location and timing of our actions' effects. This is evident in anticipatory eye movements towards the future effect's location which are performed earlier when the effect's delay is short rather than long....

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....

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...

It has been proposed that cognitive control processes may be implemented in a contextually appropriate manner through the encoding, and cued retrieval, of associations between stimuli and the control processes that were active during their encoding, forming “stimulus-control bindings” as part of episodic event files. Prior work has found strong evi...

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...

Both active response execution and passive listening to verbal codes (a form of instruction) in single prime trials leads to item-specific repetition priming effects when stimuli re-occur in single probe trials. This holds for task-specific classification (stimulus-classification, SC priming, e.g., apple - small) and action (stimulus-action, SA pri...

Cognitive control is essential for adaptive goal-directed action and has been linked to learning. Here, we investigated whether proactive effect monitoring (i.e., a proactive cognitive control process) could be instantiated by one-shot learning. When an action consistently yields the same effect, we form a bi-directional action-effect association....

item-specific priming, S-R associations

Post-error cognitive control processes are evident in, first, post-error slowing (PES) and post-error increased accuracy (PIA). A recent theory (Wessel, 2018) proposes that post-error control disrupts not only ongoing motor activity but also current task-set representations, suggesting an interdependence of post-error control and memory. In two exp...

When an action contingently yields the same effect, we form bi-directional action-effect associations that allow us to anticipate the effects of our actions. Importantly, our eyes already move towards the expected future location of our actions´ effects in anticipation of them, that is, we perform anticipatory saccades. These anticipatory saccades...

Post-error cognitive control processes are evident in, first, post-error slowing (PES) and post-error increased accuracy (PIA). A recent theory (Wessel, 2018) proposes that post-error control disrupts not only ongoing motor activity but also current task-set representations, suggesting an interdependence of post-error control and memory. In two exp...

item-specific priming

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...

While performing an action that contingently yields the same effect, we form action-effect associations that allow us to anticipate the effects of our actions. Importantly, our eyes already move towards the expected future location of our actions´ effects in anticipation of them, that is, we perform anticipatory saccades. These anticipatory saccade...

Schmidt et al.’s (2020) PEP model accurately reflects the complexity of task switching based on bottom-up assumptions and episodic memory, re-evaluating the contribution of commonly presumed top-down processes. Extending it to long-term bindings and their item-specific effects could eludicate puzzling findings regarding the independence of long-ter...

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 task switching, it has long been found that task predictability reduces task switch costs and leads to improved performance. Recently, it was demonstrated that task components, specifically a stimulus´ task-specific semantic classification, become associated with stimuli independent from responses (stimulus-classification, S-C, association vs. s...

The repeated pairing of a particular stimulus with a specific cognitive control process, such as task switching, can bind the two together in memory, resulting in the formation of stimulus-control associations. These bindings are thought to guide the context-sensitive application of cognitive control, but it is not presently known whether such stim...

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...

Contingencies between our actions and their effects allow us to form bi-directional action-effect associations that guide our goal-directed actions. Simultaneously, these action-effect associations are the basis of anticipatory saccades towards the future locations of our actions´ expected effects. The latency of these saccades is determined by the...

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...

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...

Stimulus-response (S-R) associations, the basis of learning and behavioral automaticity, are formed by the (repeated) co-occurrence of stimuli and responses and render stimuli able to automatically trigger associated responses. The strength and behavioral impact of these S-R associations increases with the number of priming instances (i.e., practic...

Several recent studies, inspired by psi theories such as Stanford's psi-mediated instrumental response (PMIR) model, have employed a tacit precognition protocol to test the notion that extrasensory perception may be nonintentional. After remarkable initial success, outcomes have been more inconsistent. One possible reason for the observed variabili...

Anticipations of future sensory events have the potential of priming motor actions that would typically cause these events. Such effect anticipations are generally assumed to rely on previous physical experiences of the contingency of own actions and their ensuing effects. Here we propose that merely imagined action effects may influence behaviour...