Our department research
We explore the fundamental building blocks of human cognition — how we see and make sense of the world around us, how we focus our attention, and how our thoughts turn into actions. In short, we study what happens in the mind when perception meets behavior.
Our team combines precise behavioral experiments with state-of-the-art brain research methods to uncover the hidden mechanisms that shape everyday mental processes. Supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and other funding agencies, our goal is to push the boundaries of basic science while also paving the way for real-world applications that improve how people live, work, and interact with technology.
A central part of our research focuses on the BRAC framework (DFG Research Unit 2790) — a modern, overarching model that explains how humans control their actions. BRAC looks at what happens on the process level, offering a detailed, mechanistic perspective on how the brain organizes, executes, and adjusts actions. It also investigates how brain rhythms, or neural oscillations, relate to these control processes.
Beyond BRAC, our projects cover a wide range of fascinating topics — from how we perceive motion, to how attention is guided by things that stand out or follow predictable patterns. We also study how stress impacts working memory and how the brain filters out irrelevant information (known as feature inhibition).
To connect our findings to the real world, we don’t stop at lab experiments. We bring our research into driving simulators, gamified settings, and virtual reality, and even observe people’s behavior in natural environments — such as on a tennis court. This combination of controlled experimentation and real-world testing helps us understand not just how the mind works in theory, but how it operates in action.
