Psychological Research Methods and Cognitive Psychology

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01.5.2025: How can we model the time-course of response activations in a dual-task? Are there interindividual differences in how much people allow such activation? Answers can be found in a paper by Valentin Koob, Alina Ahrens and Markus Janczyk together with Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen) that was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

15.4.2025: A new paper on the influence of reward on voluntary task switching by Markus Janczyk, Ludwig Danwitz and Bettina von Helversen together with Kerstin Fröber (Regensburg/Cologne) has been accepted for publication in Acta Psychologia.

08.04.2025: A new paper on cognitive associations between valence and time authored by Markus Janczyk and Katharina Tucholski together with Barbara Kaup and Rolf Ulrich (both Tübingen) has been accepted for publication in Memory & Cognition.

14.03.2025: Ananya Mandal (Munich) has successfully defended her dissertation supervised by Heinrich Liesefeld. Her work focuses on auditory distraction and has so far resulted in three well-received publications (see entries from 4.9.2024, 7.5.2024, 18.1.2024, and 13.9.2023).

30.01.2025: Valentin Koob has successfully defended his dissertation supervised by Markus Janczyk. Congratulations!

06.01.2025: From this year on, Heinrich Liesefeld serves as a Consulting Editor for the journal Cortex. He supports Vanja Kovic (Associate Editor) with evaluating manuscripts on EEG studies.

17.12.2024: The 4^th edition of the textbook Allgemeine Psychologie (Eds. Martina Rieger and Jochen Müsseler) has been published (in German). Heinrich Liesefeld contributed the chapter Aufmerksamkeit (Attention) together with Joseph Krummenacher (Freiburg) and Hermann Müller (Munich). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-68476-4

15.12.2024: We welcome Alina Ahrens (back) in our team. Alina was a long-time statistics tutor and then Bachelor student. After obtaining a Master degree in Medical Biometry, she now joined us as a PhD student.

02.12.2024: An interdisciplinary team led by Daniel Leising (Dresden) has reflected about the coordination of consensus processes in psychological research. Heinrich Liesefeld contributed his experiences made during the development of the paper "Terms of debate..." (see entries from 16.8.2024 and 15.11.2023). The resulting article has now been published in Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/27000710241298610

01.11.2024: The AG Psychological Research Methods and Cognitive Psychology warmly welcomes foreign language assistant Vera Broszeit to the team.

01.10.2024: We welcome Melike Gelen as a new member of our team. She will pursue a PhD and support the experimental practical studies.

30.09.2024: Why is cognitive-psychological research certainly basic research, but also of particular relevance for applied contexts? Jan Rummel (Heidelberg) and Markus Janczyk have published Angewandte Kognitionspsychologie (engl. "Applied Cognitive Psychology"), the first German-language textbook on this topic. The book first presents and discusses the relation of both fields and their mutual stimulation, before then presenting the cognitive-psychological foundations and their applications within selected fields of research.

13.09.2024: The Perception-Action Model by Milner and Goodale ascribes to the ventral and the dorsal cortical pathways the processing of visual information for the purpose of perception versus action control. In the recent years, many of the empirical arguments for this model have been criticized and rejected though. In a comprehensive review paper, which also includes own experiments, Kriti Bhatia, Angela Osenberg, Volker Franz (all Tübingen) and Markus Janczyk have shown that Garner interference isn't clear evidence for the model either. This work was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

04.09.2024: A new paper on auditory distraction in visual search by Ananya Mandal (Munich), Jan Röer (Witten), and Heinrich Liesefeld has been published in Visual Cognition. We demonstrate that auditory distractors do not interfere with visual search at any level of search difficulty. Interference only emerges when the auditory modality must be attended. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2024.2397825

21.08.2024: Which diffusion model in the context of conflict tasks? The Diffusion Model for Conflict tasks (DMC; Ulrich et al., 2015, Cognitive Psychology) was recently critizised as being implausible and a Revised DMC was advanced instead (RDMC; Lee & Sewell, 2024, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review). Markus Janczyk and Valentin Koob together with Ian Mackenzie have authored a (somewhat longer) comment on this, which was accepted for publication in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. The comment re-evaluates the critique of DMC and discussed conceptual and statistical issues with RDMC.

16.08.2024: Heinrich Liesefeld receives the Psychonomic Society’s 2024 Best Article Award for his article Terms of debate: Consensus definitions to guide the scientific discourse on visual distraction published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics (see entry from 15.11.2023). https://www.psychonomic.org/page/2024BestArticleAwards

14.08.2024: Do representations of action effects generalize to more common formats? Not really, or only under very special conditions. This is one result of a new paper written by Markus Janczyk, Lea Eichfelder, and Heinrich Liesefeld together with Volker Franz (Tübingen), which was accepted for publication in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. The results also raise doubts on whether response-effect learning is indeed associative.

06.07.2024: Exactly a century ago, on 6 July 1924, spontaneous electrical activity from the human brain was recorded for the first time. A comment marking this notable event and written by a large group of EEG experts, including Heinrich Liesefeld, has recently been accepted for publication in Nature Human Behaviour. Based on their own expertise and a questionnaire filled by 515 participants from 51 countries with a cumulative EEG experience of over 10,000 years, this group, headed by Faisal Mushtaq (Leeds), reflects on the past, present, and future of the EEG technique. The paper will soon be available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01941-5

15.06.2024: Dr. Thomas Narraway has started his position as a Post-Doc in a DFG-funded project of Heinrich Liesefeld and Markus Janczyk on Speed-Accuracy-Tradeoffs.

11.06.2024: To measure the efficiency of visual search and to test theories of visual attention, researchers often manipulate the number of irrelevant stimuli in a search array. The slope of the function relating search-array size to response time is then taken as a measure of search speed. Unfortunately, this measure is flawed in various ways and, therefore, Talke Michaelsen, Markus Janczyk, and Heinrich Liesefeld decided to develop an alternative approach for measuring search speed. We achieved this by bringing the order of search under experimental control and analyzing response times as a function of target position. A validation of this new approach was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.  https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001238

15.05.2024: Valentin Koob was awarded a scholarship for a two-month research stay in the USA. He will spend August and September at the Washington University in St. Louis and will pursue research on conflict control in collaboration together with Prof. Julie Bugg.

07.05.2024: A new study by Ananya Mandal (Munich), Anna Liesefeld, and Heinrich Liesefeld provides clear evidence for attentional capture by auditory stimuli. We translated a technique to isolate attention-shift related components from the electroencephalogram from visual search to auditory search. This allowed us to demonstrate how attention shifts first to a salient distractor sound and only afterwards to the target sound. The resulting paper has now been accepted for publication in The Journal of Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2196-23.2024

03.04.2024. How much is ideomotor theory supported by empirical evidence? While Custers (2023, Motivation Science) has a critical view on that, Wilfried Kunde (Würzburg) and Markus Janczyk are more optimistic and expressed their opinion in a comment on Custers (2023), which was just accepted for publication in Motivation Science.

29.02.2024. A paper of Valentin Koob and Markus Janczyk together with David Dignath (Tübingen) on potential avoidance behavior after experienced conflict in dual-tasking was accepted for publication in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

12.02.2024. In an interdisciplinary project with audio engineers and audiologists led by Melissa Ramírez (Cologne), Heinrich Liesefeld has contributed to the development of a virtual-reality based approach to screen for spatial hearing disorders. The paper reporting on our progress is now accepted for publication in Trends in Hearing. https://doi.org/10.1177/23312165241235463 

26.01.2024: The paper “Building bridges: Visual search meets action control via inter-trial sequence effects” by Dominique Lamy (Tel Aviv), Christian Frings (Trier) and Heinrich Liesefeld has been accepted for publication in the Review of General Psychology. We selectively review research and theorizing on the as of yet relatively unconnected topics of visual search and action control and link the two research areas based on similarities in task design and a certain class of empirical findings: both research communities have accumulated knowledge on how the preceding trial influences performance on the current trial. We demonstrate how considering mechanisms well-studied in the respective other research community will advance our understanding of cognitive mechanisms in both areas. https://doi.org/10.1177/10892680241232626

18.01.2024: The surprising robustness of visual search against concurrent auditory distraction by Ananya Mandal (Munich), Anna Liesefeld, and Heinrich Liesefeld (see entry from 13.09.2023) has been selected as an Editor’s Choice article. That is, our paper is among the “most exciting new findings in psychological science, selected by APA Journal editors.” (https://www.apa.org/news/editors-choice). The article can be downloaded free of charge for the next 30 days: https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001168 The preprint is available here: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hnvdm

15.11.2023: An essential prerequisite for scientific discourse is that the participants understand each other. Unfortunately, this is often not the case, but researchers from different theoretical camps employ different terms for the same construct or the same term for different constructs. Initiated by the Research Group Handling Visual Distraction (speakers: Hermann J. Müller, München, and Heinrich Liesefeld), an international team of researchers led by Heinrich Liesefeld and Dominique Lamy (Tel Aviv) has tackled this problem for research on visual distraction. In extensive discussions, we identified and defined the most central terms in the debate. The resulting paper was now accepted for publication in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. It is not only a reference work for experts but also provides an easy entry point into the topic for junior researchers. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02820-3

10.11.2023: Heinrich Liesefeld conducted a workshop on visual salience at the annual meeting of the DFG Priority Programme 2392 Visual Communication – Theoretical, Empirical, and Applied Perspectives. The goals of this half-day workshop were (a) to convey the basic definition and theoretical background on salience, (b) relate these to modern theories of visual attention, and (c) highlight several influences that were empirically shown to modulate salience effects. Based on this knowledge, stimuli from current studies by the workshop participants were jointly examined for variations in salience.

28.10.2023: The english version of the statistics textbook by Markus Janczyk and Roland Pfister (Trier) has been published with Springer as "Understanding inferential statistics. From A for significance test to Z for confidence interval".

18.10.2023: A paper on whether Backward Crosstalk is due to facilitation or interference authored by Valentin Koob, Carlotta Sauerbier and Markus Janczyk together with Hannes Schröter (DIE Bonn/FernUni Hagen) and Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen) was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

1.10.2023: Jule Kinner joins our group as a new PhD student in Project A2 of the Research Unit "Modal and Amodal Cognition".

17.9.2023: A review paper on modal and amodal representations written by Barbara Kaup and Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen), Markus Janczyk and many other authors was accepted for publication in Psychological Research. The paper summarizes the topic and literature in the context of the Research Unit "Modal and Amodal Cognition" (FOR 2718).

13.9.2023: The article “The surprising robustness of visual attention against concurrent auditory distraction” von Ananya Mandal (Munich), Anna Liesefeld und Heinrich Liesefeld was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.  In this study, we discovered that visual search is not disrupted by auditory distraction except if we force participants to listen more carefully. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001168

12.8.2023: The P_D is an ERP component extracted from the EEG that has been associated with the inhibition of distracting stimuli and that plays an important role in the current debate on visual distraction. Initiated by the Research Group Handling Visual Distraction (speakers: Hermann J. Müller, Munich, and Heinrich Liesefeld), an international team of researchers led by Nick Gaspelin (University of Missouri) and including Heinrich Liesefeld has compiled empirical findings and theoretical positions on the P_D. The resulting review paper has now been accepted in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_02051

12.7.2023: Survival-relevant information are better rememberd than other information. A new paper on the resource requirements of encoding such information written by Meike Kroneisen (Landau), Rika Groß (Mannheim), Edgar Erdfelder (Mannheim) and Markus Janczyk was accepted for publication in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

6.7.2023: Heinrich Liesefeld and Hermann Müller (Munich) have published a commentary on a target article by Jan Theeuwes. We highlight once again that a salient distractor can interfere with visual search only if observers expect a salient target, and carve out differences and similarities with Theeuwes' new theory. https://doi.org/gsgdjx

30.6.2023: The 2nd funding phase of the DFG Research Unit FOR 2718 “Modal and Amodal Cognition: Functions and Interactions“ approved (Speaker: Prof. Dr. Barbara Kaup, University of Tübingen) was approved. Markus Janczyk is PI of the research unit’s projects A2 (“Amodal and modal representations in planning and control of human action“, with Prof. Dr. Volker Franz, University of Tübingen) and A4 ("Executive functions: Are amodal representations involved in proactive control?", with Dr. Carolin Dudschig and Prof. Dr. Hartmut Leuthold, University of Tübingen).

26.6.2023: How is the salience of irrelevant stimuli related to action control? The surprising answer is: It depends on the search mode! More information on this study will be available soon in a paper by Philip Schmalbrock, Christian Frings (both at University of Trier) and Heinrich Liesefeld that was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001151

24.6.2023: How does increasing the relevance of distractors affect Simon and Flanker effects? A paper addresssing this, written by Victor Mittelstädt and Ian Mackenzie (both Tübingen) and Valentin Koob and Markus Janczyk, was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

12.6.2023: A new paper by Markus Janczyk and Jeff Miller (U of Otago, Dunedin, NZL) was accepted for publication in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. According to this paper, action effects must be entirely predictable to yield a consistent advantage. Otherwise there seem to be large interindividual differences in what humans generalize from random variations of action effects.

20.5.2023: Heinrich Liesefeld and Markus Janczyk were granted the project "Validating (easy) measures to combine speed and accuracy" from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG; 3 years, 100% postdoc position, travel and other funds).

18.5.2023: In an international replication project led by Martin Constant and Heinrich Liesefeld a Registered-Report Stage 1 obtained in-principle acceptance by PCI RR (https://osf.io/dw68r). Please get in touch if you want to contribute data to this direct replication of Eimer (1996)'s influential N2pc study within the scope of #EEGManyLabs (https://osf.io/yb3pq/).

27.4.2023: A paper on the persistent effects of visual salience by Martin Constant and Heinrich Liesefeld was published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Disconfirming earlier claims that effects of salience are short-lived and quickly overruled by top-down control, we demonstrate that even after 3s visual-working-memory performance is still affected by salience and that these effects cannot be overruled by various established top-down influences. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001420

26.2.2023: What are advantages and disadvantages and how efficienct and accurate are different numerical methods to predict the RT distribution for diffusion models with time-dependent parameters? A new paper with a thorough analysis of these questions by Thomas Richter (Magdeburg), Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen) and Markus Janczyk has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology.

5.1.2023: A new paper written by Markus Janczyk on compatibility phenomena with touchless gesture responses was accepted for publication in Experimental Brain Research.

4.12.2022: A paper on the influence of hand-position on between-task crosstalk by Ruben Ellinghaus, Roman Liepelt (Hagen), Robert Wirth, Wilfried Kunde (Würzburg), Rico Fischer (Greifswald) and Markus Janczyk was accepted for publication in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

15.11.2022: Work on a mathematical modelling of congruency sequence effects by Valentin Koob and Markus Janczyk together with Ian Mackenzie, Hartmut Leuthold, and Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen) was accepted for publication in Cognitive Psychology.

27.9.2022: A study by Lea Eichfelder, Markus Janczyk and Volker Franz (Tübingen) on semantic generalization in response-effect learning was accepted for publication in Experimental Brain Research.

22.9.2022: A study by Carolin Schonard (Bielefeld), Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen) and Markus Janczyk on the temporal dynamics of Backward Crosstalk using mousetracking was accepted for publication in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

22.6.2022: A (successful...) replication study with six experiments in the context of the Theory of Event Coding done by Markus Janczyk together with Carina G. Giesen (Jena), Birthe Moeller (Trier), David Dignath (Tübingen), and Roland Pfister (Würzburg) was accepted for publication in Psychological Research.

3.6.2022: Power calculations for repeated measures designs are sometimes not easy. How to do this in an easy way if the faktors have only 2 levels, is described in a new article by Benedikt Langenberg and Axel Mayer (Bielefeld), Reinhold Kliegl (Potsdam) and Markus Janczyk and Valentin Koob, accepted for publcation in Behavior Research Methods.

8.5.2022: Deictic time and number representations do not share direct associations, but both are spatially represented. This is the conclusion of a new paper by Markus Janczyk, Iring Koch (Aachen) and Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen), accepted for publiction in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

24.3.2022: A new paper of Markus Janczyk together with Nicoletta Simi, Ian Mackenzie, Hartmut Leuthold and Carolin Dudschig (Tübingen) on conflict adaptation effect in language processing has been accepted for publication the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

18.3.2022: A paper by Heinrich Liesefeld and Markus Janczyk on clarifying subtle but very important and consequential differences on measures to integrate speed and accuracy has been accepted for publication in Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01843-2

21.2.2022: A new paper on capacity limitations in bimanual pointing by Markus Janczyk together with Cosima Schneider (Tübingen) and Constanze Hesse (Aberdeen) has been accepted for publication in Human Movement Science.

16.2.2022: A paper on concepts of parallel processing across different experimental approaches of Valentin Koob and Markus Janczyk together with Jovita Brüning and Dietrich Manzey (TU Berlin) has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

16.11.2021: Merely encountering the same SOA again and again does not help reducing between-task interference... the conclusion of a paper by Eva Röttger and Markus Janczyk together with Hilde Haider (Cologne) and Rico Fischer (Greifswald) that was accepted for publication in Acta Psychologica.

12.11.2021: A paper investigating sequential modulations of compatibility-based and no-go BCEs written by Devu Mahesan and Rico Fischer (Greifswald) together with Markus Janczyk was accepted for publication in Acta Psychologica.

20.8.2021: A paper on the reasons for choice made between cognitive and physical tasks by Markus Janczyk together with Iman Feghhi and David Rosenbaum (UC Riverside) has been accepted for publication in Psychological Research.

10.8.2021: Done... a veeeery long paper by Valentin Koob, Markus Janczyk and Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen) on modellng Backward Crosstalk and identifying plausible models has been accepted for publication in Pychological Review The results suggest that Task 2 barely profits from its actvation during processing Task 1, but that Task 1 exhibits a bias on Task 2 selection.

13.5.2021: Work on compatibility effects in mouse-tracking done by Carolin Schonard (Bielefeld), Aiping Xiong (PennState University), Robert Proctor (Purdue University) and Markus Janczyk was accepted for publication in the American Journal of Psychology. The results suggest that a larger part of putative response-effect compatibility in such experiments might actually result from stimulus-response compatibility instead.

April 2021: Markus Janczyk was offered and accepted becoming a member of the Wilhelm-Wundt-Gesellschaft, a society dedicated to promote basic research in psychology.

22.2.2021: A new paper on the verification of presuppositions written by Cosima Schneider (Tübingen), Nadine Bade (Paris) and Markus Janczyk was accepted for publication in the Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2020.

15.10.2020: Work by Eva Röttger, Fang Zhao, Robert Gaschler (Hagen) and Hilde Haider (Köln) on task integration as a cause of the disruption of implicit sequence learning in multitasking has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognition.

09.10.2020: Cosima Schneider has successfully her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Tübingen. Congratulations!

01.10.2020: We welcome Ms. Vanessa Jurczyk and Ms. Lea Eichfelder to our working group! Ms. Jurczyk will support our team as a PostDoc, Ms. Eichfelder as a doctoral student. We are looking forward to a good cooperation!

25.8. 2020: A new paper on sequential modulations of Backward Crosstalk written by Carolin Schonard (Bielefeld), Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen) and Markus Janczyk was accepted for publication in Experimental Psychology.

19.8.2020: An article on similarities and differences between S1-R2 and R1-R2 Backward Crosstalk by Valentin Koob, Moritz Durst (Tübingen), Daniel Bratzke, Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen) and Markus Janczyk has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Cognition.

25.7.2020: A new article on the processes of presupposition processing by Cosima Schneider (Tübingen) and Markus Janczyk has been accepted for publication in Acta Psychologica.

12.6.2020: A new work on the representational basis for free-choice tasks by Markus Janczyk, Christoph Naefgen (Hagen) and Wilfried Kunde (Würzburg) was accepted for publication in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

11.6.2020: Markus Janczyk was awarded the Wilhelm Wundt Society's Science Award for his achievements in basic psychological research. More information here.

30.5.2020: The third edition of the statistics textbook "Understanding Inference Statistics" by Markus Janczyk and Roland Pfister has been published. More information here.

4.5.2020: A theoretical article on the role of action effects for double task performance by Markus Janczyk and Wilfried Kunde (Würzburg) was accepted for publication in Psychological Review. The article summarizes the joint work of the last 10 years together and focuses on a previously overlooked aspect that can lead to problems with double tasks.

3.3.2020: Work by Fang Zhao, Robert Gaschler, David Olaf Nöhring (Hagen), Eva Röttger and Hilde Haider (Köln) on "sequential modulation of across-task congruency in the serial reaction time task" has been published in Acta Psychologica.

18.12.2019: Work by Cosima Schneider (Tübingen), Nadine Bade (Paris) and Markus Janczyk on capacity-limitations in presupposition processing has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

2.12.2019: We welcome Valentin Koob as a new member of our group.

6.10.2019:  The DFG research group "Modal and Amodal Cognition: Functions and Interactions" (Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Barbara Kaup, Tübingen) was approved. Markus Janczyk is PI in the projects A2 "Modal and Amodal Representations in Planning and Control of Human Action" (together with Volker Franz, Tübingen) and A4 "Executive Functions: Are Control Processes Operating on Modal or Amodal Representations?" (according to Carolin Dudschig and Hartmut Leuthold, Tübingen). The aim of the research group is to comprehensively study the representational basis of different areas of human cognition.

1.10.2019: Dr. Eva Röttger joined our team as a postdoc.

21.8.2019: Moritz Durst (doctoral student in Tübingen) has defended his dissertation "excellent". Congratulations!

7.7.2019: An article on the processing of the (anti) presupposition of definite and indefinite articles by Cosima Schneider, Carolin Schonard, Gerhard Jäger (Tübingen), Michael Franke (Osnabrück) and Markus Janczyk was accepted for publication in cognition.

31.5.2019: The work on Speed-Accuracy Tradeoffs by Rene Liesefeld (LMU Munich) and Markus Janczyk got a blog post on the homepage of the Psychonomic Society ... more to read here.

7.5.2019: A new article by Rolf Ulrich (Tübingen) and Markus Janczyk was accepted in the journal Acta Psychologica. The article is about defining the time-space congruence effect over the extrinsic features of an act rather than the actor's end effector.

1.4.2019: Markus Janczyk took up the position at the University of Bremen.