Wilfried Kunde

University of Wuerzburg | JMU · Department of Psychology

Mouse-tracking is regarded as a powerful technique to investigate latent cognitive and emotional states. However, drawing inferences from this manifold data source carries the risk of several pitfalls, especially when using aggregated data rather than single-trial trajectories. Researchers might reach wrong conclusions because averages lump togethe...

Common knowledge holds that it takes two to tango. The same goes for imitation, which involves (at least) a model and an imitator. Many empirical studies on imitation have focused on assessing the imitator’s behavior as a function of model characteristics, thus construing the models’ behavior as stimulus, and the imitators’ behavior as response. Th...

Adult humans experience agency when their action causes certain events (sense of agency). Moreover, they can later remember what these events were (memory). Here, we investigate how the relationship between actions and events shapes agency experience and memory for the corresponding events. Participants performed actions that produced stimuli that...

Bayes factor analysis becomes increasingly popular, among other reasons, because it allows to provide evidence for the null hypothesis, which is not easily possible with the traditional frequentist approach. A conceivable strategy that apparently takes favorable aspects of both approaches on board is to use traditional frequentist analyses first an...

Binding accounts propose that action planning involves temporarily binding codes of the action’s unique features, such as its location and duration. Such binding becomes evident when another action (B) is initiated while maintaining the Action Plan A. Action B is usually impaired if it partially overlaps with the planned Action A (as opposed to ful...

Frequently, problems can be solved in more than one way. In modern computerized environments, more ways than ever exist. Naturally, human problem solvers do not always decide for the best-performing strategy available. One underlying reason might be the inability to continuously and correctly monitor each strategy’s performance. Here, we supported...

Each action results in a variety of effects, and the extent to which an effect is compatible with the action that produced it may influence the strength of the link between the action and the effect in memory. Two experiments addressed this role of action-effect compatibility on the acquisition of action-effect bindings and the retrieval of actions...

Action planning can be construed as the temporary binding of action features to form a representation known as an action file. This file is distinct from other possible, but currently not required actions of the behavioral repertoire. To further this action file approach, we investigated what happens with an initially planned action, which however,...

Large language models offer novel opportunities to seek digital medical advice. While previous research primarily addressed the performance of such artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools, public perception of these advancements received little attention. In two preregistered studies (n = 2,280), we presented participants with scenarios of patient...

Large Language Models (LLM) offer novel opportunities to seek digital medical advice. While previous research primarily addressed the performance of such artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools, public perception of these advancements received little attention. In two preregistered studies (N = 2,280), we presented participants with scenarios of p...

When a stimulus is paired with a response, a stimulus-response (SR) binding (or event file) is formed. Subsequent stimulus repetition retrieves the SR binding from memory, which facilitates (impedes) performance when the same (a different) response is required. We aimed to explore whether indirect retrieval of SR bindings by a newly learnt associat...

In basketball, an attacking player often plays a pass to one side while looking to the other side. This head fake provokes a conflict in the observing opponent, as the processing of the head orientation interferes with the processing of the pass direction. Accordingly, responses to passes with head fakes are slower and result in more errors than re...

Processing apparently irrelevant information has been linked to successful creative ideation, especially in open-minded individuals. To investigate attentional processing, prior studies in this field relied on in-laboratory eye tracking. Despite several advantages, this method also comes with downsides like high costs and slow data collection. To a...

Scrolling is a widely used mean to interact with visual displays, usually to move content to a certain target location on the display. Understanding how user scroll might identify potentially suboptimal use and allows to infer users’ intentions. In the present study, we examined where users click on a scrollbar depending on the intended scrolling a...

It is known for a long time that some drawings composed of points, lines, and areas are systematically misperceived. The origin of these geometrical illusions is still unknown. Here we outline how a recent progress in attentional research contributes to a better understanding of such perceptual distortions. The basic idea behind this approach is th...

Switching between tasks entails costs when compared to repeating the same task. It is unclear whether switch costs also occur when repeating the same task but switching the underlying cognitive strategy (CS). Here, we investigated whether CS switch costs exist despite overlap in mental processing between CSs and a lack of abstract goal (always “sol...

Cuing or executing a task impacts processing pathways for task-relevant information. While there is ample evidence that processing associated with task execution changes with practice, such evidence regarding cue-induced task preparation is scarce. Here we explored practice-related changes of processing pathways by task cuing in order to assess the...

Innovative solutions promise to improve our lives. Novel, unfamiliar approaches, however, also come with increased uncertainty regarding their feasibility and quality. In four preregistered experiments (N = 272 adults), we investigated implicit biases toward such innovative approaches. We tracked hand movements while participants chose between opti...

Despite the societal relevance of creative ideas, humans favor traditional over more original solutions, conceivably because of the increased uncertainty that comes with trying novel approaches. Here, we tested whether this anti-creativity bias can be counteracted by increasing familiarity with, and confidence in, creative solutions. Participants c...

The Ponzo illusion is a famous optical illusion that is not well understood so far. Here we suggest that its origin is closely linked to distribution of spatial attention. In essence, it arises because the size of the attentional field varies between different parts of the stimulus layout, which comes with different spatial resolution and, as a con...

Creative ideation can be driven by honorable objectives, but also by nefarious intentions. Even though this dark side of creativity gained scientific attention recently, the underlying cognitive processes remain poorly understood. In a preregistered experiment, we applied the process-tracing method of mouse tracking to precisely assess the cognitiv...

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.

The self-prioritization effect suggests that self-relevant information has a processing advantage over information that is not directly associated with the self. In consequence, reaction times are faster and accuracy rates higher when reacting to self-associated stimuli rather than to other-related stimuli (Sui et al., Journal of Experimental Psych...

With ubiquitous computing, problems can be solved using more strategies than ever, though many strategies feature subpar performance. Here, we explored whether and how simple advice regarding when to use which strategy can improve performance. Specifically, we presented unfamiliar alphanumeric equations (e.g., A + 5 = F ) and asked whether counting...

We assessed the relation of creativity and unethical behaviour by manipulating the thinking style of participants (N=450 adults) and measuring the impact of this manipulation on the prevalence of dishonest behaviour. Participants performed one of three inducer tasks: the alternative uses task to promote divergent thinking, the remote associates tas...

Rules are often stated in a negated manner ("no trespassing") rather than in an affirmative manner ("stay in your lane"). Here, we build on classic research on negation processing and, using a finger-tracking design on a touchscreen, we show that following negated rather than affirmative rules is harder as indicated by multiple performance measures...

To acquire and process information, performers can frequently rely on both internal and extended cognitive strategies. However, after becoming acquainted with two strategies, performers in previous studies exhibited a pronounced behavioral preference for just one strategy, which we refer to as perseveration. What is the origin of such perseveration...

Neuroanatomical variations across the visual field of human observers go along with corresponding variations of the perceived coarseness of visual stimuli. Here we show that horizontal gratings are perceived as having lower spatial frequency than vertical gratings when occurring along the horizontal meridian of the visual field, whereas gratings oc...

Modality-compatible stimulus–response mappings (e.g., responding vocally to an auditory stimulus and manually to a visual stimulus) are often easier to perform than modality-incompatible sets (reversed modality mappings). Here, we investigate sequential, trial-to-trial, modulations of modality compatibility effects. By reanalyzing a previous experi...

Despite the societal relevance of innovation, humans favor traditional over more original solutions, conceivably because of the increased uncertainty that comes with trying novel approaches. Here, we tested whether this anti-creativity bias can be counteracted by increasing familiarity with, and confidence in, creative solutions. Participants chose...

Background: Human performers often recruit environment-based assistance to acquire or process information, such as relying on a smartphone app, a search engine, or a conversational agent. To make informed choices between several of such extended cognitive strategies, performers need to monitor the performance of these options. Objective: In the...

Creative ideation can be driven by honorable objectives, but also by nefarious intentions. Even though this dark side of creativity gained scientific attention recently, the underlying cognitive processes remain poorly understood. In a preregistered experiment, we applied the process-tracing method of mouse tracking to precisely assess the cognitiv...

Repeatedly encountering a stimulus biases the observer’s affective response and evaluation of the stimuli. Here we provide evidence for a causal link between mere exposure to fictitious news reports and subsequent voting behavior. In four pre-registered online experiments, participants browsed through newspaper webpages and were tacitly exposed to...

Background: Human performers often recruit environment-based assistance to acquire or process information, such as relying on a smartphone app, a search engine, or a conversational agent. To make informed choices between several of such extended cognitive strategies, performers need to monitor the performance of these options. Objective: In the pre...

Frequently, problems can be solved in more than one way. In modern computerized environments, more ways than ever exist. Naturally, human problem solvers do not always decide for the best-performing cognitive strategy available. One underlying reason might be the inability to continuously and correctly monitor each strategy’s performance. Here, we...

The present study explored whether dual task performance is affected by deviations from the expected time point of a secondary task. In two psychological refractory period experiments, participants responded to two tasks, separated by either a short or long delay. In contrast to traditional dual tasking studies, however, the identity of Task 1 prob...

Distributing complex actions across agents is commonplace in human society. The objective efficiency of joint actions comes with critical challenges for the sense of agency of individual agents, complicating an accurate formation of these agents’ perceived control over actions and action outcomes. Here we report a new experimental paradigm to inves...

A square filled with parallel horizontal or vertical lines appears perceptually extended in the direction orthogonal to the lines. Here, we suggest that this Helmholtz illusion arises due to changes in spatial attention that entail changes at very early stages of perceptual processing. Three experiments are reported which tested this assumption. In...

Changes in body perception often arise when observers are confronted with related yet discrepant multisensory signals. Some of these effects are interpreted as outcomes of sensory integration of various signals, whereas related biases are ascribed to learning-dependent recalibration of coding individual signals. The present study explored whether t...

We assessed the relation of creativity and unethical behavior by manipulating the thinking style of participants (N = 450 adults) and measuring the impact of this manipulation on the prevalence of dishonest behavior. Participants performed one of three inducer tasks: the alternative uses task to promote divergent thinking, the remote associates tas...

To acquire and process information, performers can frequently rely on both internal and extended cognitive strategies. However, after becoming acquainted with two strategies, performers in previous studies exhibited a pronounced behavioral preference for just one strategy, which we refer to as perseveration. What is the origin of such perseveration...

Response durations for simple key presses are an easily available but heavily underused measure. Whereas response times dominate the toolbox of experimental psychologists and cognitive modelers alike, any study with standard key-press responses also allows for the measurement of such durations as the time from response onset to response offset. Mor...

Feature binding accounts state that features of perceived and produced events are bound into event-files. Performance while responding to an event is impaired when some, as opposed to all or none, of this event's features already belong to a previous event-file. While these partial repetition costs are generally considered to be indicators of featu...

In contrast to traditional dualistic views of cognition, visual stimulus processing appears not independent of bodily factors such as hand positioning. For example, reduced crosstalk between two temporally overlapping tasks has been observed when the hands are moved into the attentional window alongside their respective stimuli (i.e., establishing...

Typically, head fakes in basketball are generated to, and actually do, deteriorate performance on the side of the observer. However, potential costs at the side of the producer of a fake action have only rarely been investigated before. It is thus not clear yet if the benefit (i.e., slowed reactions in the observer) of performing a head fake is ove...

Human actions sometimes aim at preventing an event from occurring. How these to-be-prevented events are represented, however, is poorly understood. Recent proposals in the literature point to a possible divide between effect-producing, operant actions, and effect-precluding, prevention actions, suggesting that the control of operant actions relies...

Overt and imagined action seem inextricably linked. Both have similar timing, activate shared brain circuits, and motor imagery influences overt action and vice versa. Motor imagery is, therefore, often assumed to recruit the same motor processes that govern action execution, and which allow one to play through or simulate actions offline. Here, we...

People interact with technical systems every day, making use of manifold input methods. One possible but not yet very established input method is eye gaze. The present article investigates a gaze-controlled interface in the context of manual assembly tasks, where it provides a language-free and at the same time hands-free input alternative. To this...

Recent research demonstrated that mere presentation of a task cue influences subsequent unconscious semantic priming by attentional sensitization of related processing pathways. The direction of this influence depended on task-set dominance. Dominant task sets with a compatible cue-task mapping were supposed to be rapidly suppressed, while weak tas...

Various “embodied perception” phenomena suggest that what people sense of their body shapes what they perceive of the environment and that what they perceive of the environment shapes what they perceive of their bodies. For example, an observer’s own hand can be felt where a fake hand is seen, events produced by own body movements seem to occur ear...

The present study examined the perceptual consequences of learning arbitrary mappings between visual stimuli and hand movements. Participants moved a small cursor with their unseen hand twice to a large visual target object and then judged either the relative distance of the hand movements (Exp.1), or the relative number of dots that appeared in th...

When telling a lie, humans might engage in stronger monitoring of their behavior than when telling the truth. Initial evidence has indeed pointed towards a stronger recruitment of capacity-limited monitoring processes in dishonest than honest responding, conceivably resulting from the necessity to overcome automatic tendencies to respond honestly....

Previous studies demonstrated that contingency learning can be both (a) unaware (Schmidt et al., 2007), and (b) explained in terms of an automatic retrieval of stimulus-response bindings from the last episode in which the cue stimulus has been presented (Giesen et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2020). We investigated whether learning is selective in a...

Discrete task-relevant features of an overt response, such as response location, are bound to, and retrieved by coincidentally occurring auditory stimuli. Here we studied whether continuous, task-irrelevant response features like force or response duration also become bound to, and retrieved by such stimuli. In two experiments we asked participants...

Re-encountering a stimulus retrieves nominally relevant, categorical response features related to previous action decisions in response to this stimulus. Whether binding and retrieval extend to nominally irrelevant, metric features relating to an actual body movement is unknown, however. In two experiments, we thus tested whether repeating target o...

Producing deceptive actions in sports: The costs of generating head fakes in basketball Typically, head fakes in basketball are generated to deteriorate performance on the side of the observer. However, little is known about the potential costs at the side of the producer of a fake action. Here, we studied such head-fake production costs. Partici...

The human cognitive system houses efficient mechanisms to monitor ongoing actions. Upon detecting an erroneous course of action, these mechanisms are commonly assumed to adjust cognitive processing to mitigate the error's consequences and to prevent future action slips. Here, we demonstrate that error detection has far earlier consequences by feedi...

The perceived compression of the interval between a voluntary action and a subsequent consequence is termed temporal binding and serves as an implicit measure for sense of agency. In everyday life, oftentimes multiple actions are required for goal attainment, i.e., a multi-step sequence of actions has to be performed to evoke the desired effect. Ho...

Our actions cause manifold environmental changes. Monitoring these action effects serves at least two vital functions: While the validation of currently relevant effects assesses goal-achievement, screening for currently irrelevant effects accumulates knowledge about potential action-effect relationships. However, monitoring the perceptual conseque...

There is evidence that planning an action relies on binding codes of the relevant features of that action into an action plan. Such binding is indicated by the observation that planning a novel action is impaired if it shares some but not all features with another action that is held in memory for later execution. Most previous studies have focused...

To act successfully, agents must monitor whether their behavior reached predicted effects. As deviations from predicted effects can result from own behavior (response-errors) or from circumstantial unreliability (effect-errors), both the own efferent activities and the accomplished environmental outcomes must be monitored. In three experiments, we...

Human perception and action rely on a fundamental binding mechanism that forges integrated event representations from distributed features. Encountering any one of these features later on can retrieve the whole event, thus expediting cognitive processing. The traditional view on binding confines it to successful action episodes, holding that the hu...

Perceptual changes that an agent produces by efferent activity can become part of the agent’s minimal self. Yet, in human agents, efferent activities produce perceptual changes in various sensory modalities and in various temporal and spatial proximities. Some of these changes occur at the “biological” body, and they are to some extent conveyed by...

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...

An object is perceived as larger when it is surrounded by smaller context objects than when it is surrounded by larger context objects. The origin of this well-known phenomenon, called as Ebbinghaus or Titchener circles illusion, is still puzzling. Here we introduce a basic explanation of how this illusion could emerge and provide some preliminary...

2AbstractOvert and imagined action seem inextricably linked. Both follow similar timings, activate shared brain circuits, and motor imagery influences overt action and vice versa. Motor imagery is therefore often assumed to rely onthe motorprocesses governing action execution itself, which allow one to play through or simulate actions offline. Here...

Visual perception of surfaces is of utmost importance in everyday life. Therefore, it comes naturally, that different surface structures evoke different visual impressions in the viewer even if the material underlying these surface structures is the same. This topic is especially virulent for manufacturing processes in which more than one stakehold...

Objects which a human agent controls by efferent activities (such as real or virtual tools) can be perceived by the agent as belonging to his or her body. This suggests that what an agent counts as “body” is plastic, depending on what she or he controls. Yet there are possible limitations for such momentary plasticity. One of these limitations is t...

It has been proposed that statistical integration of multisensory cues may be a suitable framework to explain temporal binding, that is, the finding that causally related events such as an action and its effect are perceived to be shifted towards each other in time. A multisensory approach to temporal binding construes actions and effects as indivi...

Human perception and action rely on a fundamental binding mechanism that forges integrated event representations from distributed features. Encountering any one of these features later on can retrieve the whole event, thus expediting cognitive processing. The traditional view on binding confines it to successful action episodes, however, holding th...

According to ideomotor accounts, actions are cognitively represented by their sensory effects. The response-effect compatibility (R-E compatibility) paradigm investigates this notion by presenting predictable effect stimuli that are produced by the response (“response effects”). The R-E compatibility effect denotes the finding of better performance...

Previous research has revealed changes in the perception of objects due to changes of object-oriented actions. In present study, we varied the arm and finger postures in the context of a virtual reaching and grasping task and tested whether this manipulation can simultaneously affect the perceived size and distance of external objects. Participants...

The present study explored the origin of perceptual changes repeatedly observed in the context of actions. In Experiment 1, participants tried to hit a circular target with a stylus movement under restricted feedback conditions. We measured the perception of target size during action planning and observed larger estimates for larger movement distan...

The present study examined how the size of attended area affects the repulsion of perceived object location from the focus of attention reported previously (attentional repulsion effect). We induced sustained changes in the size of attentional focus and tested the impact of this experimental variation on the perception of object location. The resul...

Human agents draw on a variety of explicit and implicit cues to construct a sense of agency for their actions and the effects of these actions on the outside world. Associative mechanisms binding actions to their immediate effects support the evolution of agency for operant actions. However, human agents often also act to prevent a certain event fr...