Prevention Behavior

How do we control our actions when preventing or avoiding negative events? Prevention behavior comes with the pecularity that agents hardly ever perceive the key element triggering their action as a successful prevention action leads to the omission of the initially expected event. We are interested in how this pecularity influences for example action representations in our cognitive system, our feeling to be in control, or decisions when to act.

Exemplary Publications

Pfister, R., Tonn, S., Weller, L., Kunde, W. & Schwarz, K. A. (2021). To prevent means to know: Explicit but no implicit agency for prevention behavior. Cognition206, 104489.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104489

Tonn, S., Schaaf, M., Kunde, W. & Pfister, R. (2023). Action representations in prevention behavior: Evidence from motor execution. Cognition234, 105370.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105370