Meta-Cognition (Symposium)

Metacognition – monitoring and controlling one’s own cognitions – is among the most fascinating abilities of the human mind. In recent years, metacognition has received considerable attention in experimental psychology. This symposium presents new findings from this intriguing field of research. In the first talk, Zawadzka and Hanczakowski examine how metacognitive monitoring during repeated study trials benefits learning. In the second talk, Zimdahl and Undorf report research showing that knowledge about retrieval success and failure biases metamemory judgments. The following two talks address social aspects of metacognitive monitoring and control. Undorf presents work indicating that judgments about other persons’ memories are similar to judgments about one’s own memory in that both rely on nonanalytical, experience-based processes. Kuhlmann reports experiments showing that the ability to generate helpful memory cues for oneself is spared from aging, whereas the ability to generate memory cues in order to help other persons to remember is impaired in older age. Finally, Rouault, Dayan, and Fleming report behavioral and neuroimaging data indicating that confidence in single decisions supports the formation of global self-performance estimates. Taken together, the five talks of the symposium offer an up-to-date overview of current research in metacognition.

Psychophysiological Correlates of Effort-related Processes (Symposium)

Recent decades have shown increased interest in physiological measures reflecting effort-related psychological processes. This symposium combines six presentations that showcase the variety of examined topics and employed measures in the field. The first two presentations will elaborate on the association between physiological and behavioural measures of effort. Capa will present research examining behavioural and physiological adaptations to changes in mental workload showing that the association between pre-ejection period and cognitive performance varies as a function of task demand. Bijleveld will then discuss the relationship between feelings of effort and physiological correlates of effort presenting data that reveal a dissociation between task demand-induced changes in self-reported effort and changes in pupil dilation. The following presentations will present applications of motivational intensity theory’s effort-related predictions to different psychological phenomena. Gendolla will elaborate on boundary conditions of implicit priming on effort showing that briefly presented affective pictures only affect effort-related cardiovascular activity if they are processed in an achievement context and without explicit awareness. Lasauskaite will present a study that highlights the impact of light conditions on effort-related sympathetic activity showing that cold, blue light results in weaker pre-ejection period response than warm, red light. Richter will compare two conflicting predictions about the impact of the implicit achievement motive on effort presenting findings that demonstrate that its impact on effort varies as a function of the clarity of task demand. Slade will discuss an application of motivational intensity theory to listening presenting results that suggest that pre-ejection period reactivity reflects listening demand.

Priming (Individual Talks)

Perception (Individual Talks)

Executive Function: Multi-Tasking (Individual Talks)

Decision-Making 1 (Individual Talks)

POSTER SESSIONS: Perception and (Working) Memory

POSTER SESSION: Emotion, Agency, and Learning

POSTER SESSION: Attention

Recent Findings from Experimental Studies on the Re-occurence of Repetitive Negative Thoughts (Symposium)

The experience of getting stuck in one’s own negative thoughts is extremely common and its pathological forms have been discussed as maintaining factors in several mental disorders. In this symposium, repetitive negative thoughts (RNT) is an umbrella term for negative, repetitive, and uncontrollable thoughts, images or memories that are intrusive and difficult to disengage from. Five presentations address either factors that influence RNT, such as negative appraisals, or factors that are influenced by RNT, such as positive affect. The first study investigates whether rumination – in comparison to distraction - has an imminent effect on unwanted intrusive thoughts about a car accident of a beloved person in undergraduate students. The second presentation addresses the question whether in high worriers, a positive interpretation training reduces levels of worry, compared to an active control group. The third study predicts that mode of rumination (abstract vs. concrete) and type of emotion (sadness vs. anger) have an interactive effect on affect. The fourth presentation shows that positive reappraisal training results in lower intrusion distress from negative autobiographical events than negative reappraisal training. Finally, the last presentation addresses the influence of positive memory elaboration training compared to control training on repetitive negative thoughts in daily life and concludes that positive memory elaborations are helpful in reducing RNT.

Neuro-cognitive Control Mechanisms in Human Multi-tasking (Symposium)

Multitasking, i.e. performing more than one task concurrently, has become an ubiquitous and inevitable aspect of our modern life. Although it might seem that we do not have any difficulties with performing temporally overlapping tasks, usually severe performance decrements emerge in these multitasking situations. In the last decades, a vast body of theories from behavioral research has explained the persistent occurrence of performance decrements in multitasking and the role of cognitive control mechanisms in dealing with these. Based on these profound conceptions, in this symposium we aim to further advance the understanding of the neural mechanisms involved in specific aspects of human multitasking, focusing on neuro-cognitive control mechanisms involved in concurrent task processing. For this purpose, a series of empirical studies employing various neuroscientific research methods will be presented. These studies cover the role of different brain regions such as the basal ganglia or the lateral prefrontal cortex for enabling multitasking performance. Furthermore, the studies address how structural as well as functional brain differences can account for individual differences in cognitive as well as cognitive-motor multitasking performance. Also, they will shed light on neuro-cognitive subprocesses that are required for multitasking, such as executive control or error-monitoring. In addition to these studies, in a concluding discussion we will integrate the findings and provide perspectives for future research.

Advances in Auditory Distraction Research (Symposium)

It is a well-established finding that working memory processes are disrupted by distractor speech. Different theories have been proposed about the mechanisms that are responsible for the disruptive effect. The symposium will bring together researchers with divergent theoretical positions who will present novel findings about the acoustic and semantic properties that cause auditory distraction and the types of processes that are susceptible to it. The talks will broaden our knowledge about why it is so difficult to ignore irrelevant speech and provide new insights on how cognitive processing can be shielded from its detrimental effects. These advances in auditory distraction research are not least driven by methodological improvements such as rigorous power analyses, preregistered replications, Bayesian meta-analyses and precise (mathematical) formulations of hypotheses.

Motivation and Interest (Individual Talks)

Conditioning (Individual Talks)

Virtual Reality, Simulations and Games (Individual Talks)

Motor Control (Individual Talks)

Cognitive Processes in Categorization Decisions (Symposium)

A growing theoretical diversity makes it increasingly difficult to meet the demands upon testing and interpreting theoretical assumptions on how people acquire knowledge about categories that form the basis for making decisions. To clarify the assumed processes requires testing the behavioural predictions of category learning models. At the same time, it is crucial to test basic assumptions on the underlying cognitive processes, for instance, on the role of similarity based generalization in category representations, or the distribution of attention during recall of category instances. The symposium congregates researchers presenting their recent advances in modelling and measuring the cognitive processes underlying category learning and decision making. A collection of six talks will provide insights and possible solutions through rigorous experimental designs, cognitive computational modelling and process tracing (eye-tracking). 1) Maarten Speekenbrink shows how outcome uncertainty in experience-based decisions guides the generalization and transfer of prior beliefs in exploration tasks. 2) Janina Hoffman presents a learning model that integrates knowledge abstraction with retrieval from memory to predict judgment accuracy and familiarity-based choices. 3) René Schlegelmilch will introduce a novel category learning model, which provides a powerful alternative to classical (problem-specific) approaches. 4) Andy Wills presents an open collaboration project making statistical tools accessible for concurrent model analyses, simulations, and hypotheses testing. 5) Agnes Rosner will show how eye-tracking methods can be used to test cognitive processes underlying memory-based categorization decisions. 6) The last talk by Emmanuel Pothos brings together both eye-tracking and cognitive modelling to describe information search during categorisation decision making.

Experimental Aesthetics 1 (Symposium)

Experimental Aesthetics is the second-oldest branch of Experimental Psychology. Subsequent to his Psychophysics, Gustav Theodor Fechner established the empirical, experimental study of aesthetics "from below", using empirical building blocks. Firmly grounded in the psychophysical and cognitive paradigms, the field continues to thrive. Our symposium convenes contributions investigating aesthetic domains ranging from dance, literature, music, visual arts, and more. Researchers engage in the quest for elucidating domain-general as well as highly domain-specific mental processing architecture.

Cognitive Modeling in Experimental Psychology (Symposium)

Cognitive modeling provides a powerful methodological tool in various domains of experimental psychology (e.g., memory, categorization, judgment and decision making). Despite its long tradition in psychology (e.g., Estes, 1950), it has become a more widespread approach only recently (e.g., Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2018; Busemeyer & Diederich, 2009; Lee & Wagenmakers, 2013). Recent technical advances (e.g., Bayesian estimation approaches, hierarchical modeling) and novel software tools have facilitated the application of cognitive modeling and enable an increasingly large number of researcher to incorporate cognitive modeling into their methodological arsenal. This symposium features recent applications of cognitive modeling in experimental psychology and has three goals. First, it will be shown how cognitive modeling can help disentangle and measure latent psychological processes that are not readily visible in observed data (e.g., learning processes, evaluation, memory and response processes). Second, the symposium demonstrates how formal models enable one to derive precise quantitative predictions of extant theoretical ideas that can then be compared to each other based on empirical data (e.g., heuristics vs. optimal models), and how the theoretical constructs of different models can be related to each other. The third goal of the symposium is to present and discuss novel methodological developments of cognitive modeling (implementation in meta-analysis, testing the robustness across estimation methods). The symposium will bring together researchers from various research groups in Europe, reflecting the increasing popularity and usefulness of cognitive modeling in experimental psychology.

Learning (Individual Talks)

Social Psychology (Individual Talks)

Decision-Making 2 (Individual Talks)

POSTER SESSION: Decisions and Cognitive Control

POSTER SESSION: Eyetracking and Neuroscience

POSTER SESSION: Language

Rethinking Source Memory and Guessing: General Mechanisms and Determinants (Symposium)

In our everyday life, remembering the source, that is the origin of an information (e.g., who told me about the new medicine? Where did I read the latest news?), can be critical for judgement formation, and thus behavior. Source monitoring encompasses all cognitive processes that are at play whenever people attribute information to its origin including source memory (i.e., actually remembering the source of an information) and source guessing (i.e., making an educated guess in the absence of memory). Both processes can have far-reaching consequences, for example for assessing the reliability of eyewitness testimony or, more generally, for evaluating the credibility of received information. Acknowledging the importance of source memory and guessing, this symposium will specifically focus on underlying mechanisms and important influencing factors of both processes using a joint theoretical framework and mathematical modeling to disentangle memory and guessing processes. In particular, the symposium will first cover the underlying components and mechanisms of source memory and guessing, respectively. Following this, new insights from metamemory research will be provided. Finally, we will focus on the ecological relevance of source memory, with reference to its social adaptivity and behavioral consequences. Based on multinomial model analyses, experimental evidence from these multifaceted aspects of source monitoring will be presented and brought up for discussion.

Experimental Aesthetics 2 (Symposium)

This is the second part of the morning symposium on Experimental Aesthetics. Experimental Aesthetics is the second-oldest branch of Experimental Psychology. Subsequent to his Psychophysics, Gustav Theodor Fechner established the empirical, experimental study of aesthetics "from below", using empirical building blocks. Firmly grounded in the psychophysical and cognitive paradigms, the field continues to thrive. Our symposium convenes contributions investigating aesthetic domains ranging from dance, literature, music, visual arts, and more. Researchers engage in the quest for elucidating domain-general as well as highly domain-specific mental processing architecture.

Emotion 1 (Individual Talks)

Memory (Individual Talks)

Neuroscience (Individual Talks)

Language (Individual Talks)

Semantic Context Effects on Language Production: New Perspectives and Methods (Symposium)

During language production speakers are influenced by the semantic context in which they speak. Numerous studies using experimental paradigms like the Picture-Word-Interference (PWI), the blocked-cyclic or the continuous naming paradigm, have revealed that semantic context can interfere with or facilitate language production. In this symposium we introduce novel approaches that build on established findings but employ new methods, perspectives and applications to the study of semantic context effects. Moving forward from classical PWI, Cornelia van Scherpenberg will present data on this paradigm in combination with eye tracking showing how speakers make use of the semantic context they view. Eva Belke will discuss semantic interference across languages, demonstrating how the blocked-cyclic naming paradigm can be used to assess lexical-semantic representations in Turkish-German bilingual children. Speaking in its most natural form – during social interaction and shared activities – will be addressed in two contributions. Hsin-Pei Lin will describe how seemingly unrelated objects can induce interference in naming after they are introduced in a unifying narrative told by a task partner. Anna Kuhlen will present electrophysiological and behavioural data from a social setting in which two task partners alternate naming pictures, investigating whether the partner’s word retrieval process is simulated. Finally, an innovative combination of TMS and PWI will be introduced by Katrin Sakreida, allowing insights into the spatial and temporal mapping of semantic processes in language-related cortical regions. Our symposium will provide intriguing insights on cutting-edge methodological approaches but also new theoretical facets in a thriving field of language production research.

Current Trends in Implicit Learning Research (Symposium)

Many researchers claim that people can detect regularities in their environment and adapt behavior accordingly in the absence of awareness. However, the demonstration of such implicit (unconscious) learning hinges on participants’ unawareness of the process and products of learning or on the necessity of two cognitive processes (an automatic and a deliberative one) to explain behavior. This symposium will bring together researchers employing different paradigms and methods of investigating the possibility of unconscious learning. The first two talks will present new insights in evaluative conditioning: Mandy Hütter will show that its sensitivity to contingencies depends on the ratio of positive to negative stimulus pairings, while Christoph Stahl will provide evidence for a single-process perspective on evaluative conditioning that does not require an automatic process. In the domain of category learning, Andy Wills will present recent work on the COVIS dual-process model, showing that participants’ apparent use of implicit categorization strategies may be due to inaccurate strategy classification. Because evidence for implicit learning often requires proving the null hypothesis of zero awareness, Zoltan Dienes will show how to use Bayes factors to obtain evidence for (or against) one’s theory relative to the null. The final two talks will address the often low correlations observed between awareness and behavioral measures. Miguel Vadillo will show that low correlations in contextual cuing are biased by the reliabilities of both measures. Lastly, Simone Malejka will show that the same holds true for memory suppression and present three Bayesian models to correct for unreliability.

Visual Attention´s Three Guides (Symposium)

As soon as we open our eyes to perceive the world around us, our attention is drawn to certain stimuli in our environment. Originally, it was assumed that either bottom-up (i.e., saliency) or top-down guides (i.e., search goals) steer our attention. Bottom-up guides make it easy to spot the green apple among the oranges, whereas top-down guides help us to find the red apple among pomegranates. However, recent ideas suggest that attentional selection is likely not as black and white as initially assumed. A person´s prior experience (i.e., learning history) appears to also direct attention and distinctions between bottom-up, top-down, and experience-based processes have proven surprisingly difficult in some cases. Likely, often more than one guide steers visual attention. In this symposium, examples from a wide range of topics and methods demonstrate how these three guides affect visual attention and how difficult their differentiation may be. First, two talks, on contingent capture and crowding, assess the influence of bottom-up and top-down processes on visual attention, as well as their remarkable interactions. Then, a talk on how decision-making reflects in pupil dilation and microsaccade rates provides further evidence for an influence of top-down processes. Subsequently, two talks investigating the influences of native language and anticipated action consequences on attention indicate possible effects of selection history, while also illustrating the blurred borders between top-down and experience-based processes. The final talk aims to integrate the influence of several guides for visual attention into a model for oculomotor control levels in free-choice saccades.

Morals (Individual Talks)

Feedback (Individual Talks)

Methodology (Individual Talks)

Can imitation, observation, and joint action be socially modulated?  A cross-paradigm & meta-analytical perspective (Symposium)

In the last decades, social phenomena including automatic imitation, observational learning, and joint action and their underlying psychological processes became “hot” topics in scientific psychological research. Thus, researchers developed social variants of prominent cognitive paradigms, such as the joint Simon task, the observational stimulus-response binding paradigm, or the imitation-inhibition task—to name just a few examples. These paradigms not only allow for studying the cognitive underpinnings of social key topics. Also, they are particularly insightful, because their findings challenge the explanatory power of (so far) purely cognitive accounts. Evidence for the social nature of these paradigms comes from studies that test the influence of certain “social” moderators (group membership, interdependence, etc.). Strikingly, at the backdrop of the current crisis of confidence in psychological research, a critical examination on the robustness of these moderating effects is currently missing. In this symposium, we aim at filling this gap by critically assessing the degree to which social moderators actually influence social variants of prominent cognitive paradigms (joint Simon task; imitation-inhibition task; observational stimulus-response binding task). All contributors will explain the nature of each paradigm and review recent evidence. Specifically, all contributors commit to a meta-analytical approach and will unpack their “social file drawer” and present data on social factors that did or did not moderate the effect of interest. This paves the way for an in-depth discussion of possible underlying psychological processes that are common to all of the presented effects and come with high explanatory power across all of these paradigms.

Uncovering Cognitive Processes using Mouse-tracking: Novel extensions and Applications (Symposium)

Mouse-tracking – the recording and analysis of mouse movements while participants decide between different options presented as buttons on a computer screen – is becoming a popular process tracing method in psychological research. Typically, mouse movements are used as an indicator of commitment to or conflict between choice options during the decision process. Based on this assumption, researchers have employed mouse-tracking to gain a closer understanding of real-time cognitive processing in many psychological domains. This symposium pursues three goals. First, we introduce mouse-tracking to interested experimental psychologists, outlining the theoretical assumptions behind the method and introducing technical implementations. One talk will present a new software package for conducting mouse-tracking experiments online (Henninger). A further talk presents an R package for performing advanced analyses and visualizations of mouse-tracking data (Kieslich). Second, the symposium presents novel applications of mouse-tracking. This includes one of the first applications of mouse-tracking within clinical populations that investigates social perception in Borderline Personality Disorder (Hepp) and exemplary applications in the other talks, including decisions under risk, social dilemmas and judgmental biases. Third, the symposium presents methodological extensions of mouse-tracking. This includes the combination of eye- and mouse-tracking to jointly model information acquisition and evaluation (Frame). A further talk presents different methods for identifying changes of mind and compares their validity in several experiments (Palfi). The symposium will end with a panel discussion of all speakers that will discuss methodological challenges and future directions for mouse-tracking research. The discussion will take place from 15:40-16:00 (not displayed in program).

Testing Your Memory: Current research on the Forward Testing Effect and the Benefits of Unsuccessful Retrieval (Symposium)

Testing can have a number of beneficial effects on long-term memory and learning. For instance, a direct benefit of testing, referred to as the backward testing effect in the literature, is the finding that retrieval practice of previously studied information can improve its long-term retention more than restudy does. However, there are also indirect benefits of testing, including the forward testing effect and the benefits of unsuccessful retrieval. The forward testing effect describes the finding that retrieval practice of previously studied information enhances learning and retention of subsequently studied other information. The benefits of unsuccessful retrieval refer to the finding that generating errors in impossible recall tests can enhance subsequent feedback learning and thus improve long-term memory. The speakers of the symposium will present their ongoing research on the forward testing effect and the benefits of unsuccessful retrieval, addressing both theoretical and practical aspects of these effects. So doing, the symposium will directly connect with the keynote "Testing your memory: The many consequences of retrieval on long-term learning and retention" presented by David Shanks. The symposium will end with a panel discussion on the effects of testing on memory and learning, moderated by keynote speaker David Shanks.

Emotion 2 (Individual Talks)

Executive Functioning: Control (Individual Talks)

Attention (Individual Talks)