German Research Council grant: FOR 2790

The German Research Council founds the Research Unit Binding and Retrieval in Action Control – BRAC (DFG FOR 2790/ spokesperson Christian Frings). 8 projects in 8 different labs get funded for the next 3 years.
Here you'll find the official press releases of the University of Trier:

• Wie der Mensch seine Handlungen steuert (2022)

• An der Uni Trier entsteht ein Expertenzentrum für menschliches Handeln (2019)

Summary of the Research Unit’s Approach

Basic processes of human action control have been studied in Cognitive Psychology with different paradigms (e.g., task switching, negative priming, sequential conflict, action planning). Each of these paradigms has generated a wealth of findings and insights. Research with these paradigms, however, has typically developed separately and in isolation, with each paradigm being assumed to address a different and potentially unique facet of action control (e.g., cognitive flexibility, inhibition, cognitive control).

Recently, however, episodic Stimulus-Response binding and retrieval have been proposed as a unitary framework that can explain effects across various action control paradigms (e.g., Hommel, 2016; Schmidt, De Houwer, & Rothermund, 2016). Capitalizing on the enormous potential inherent in this unifying approach, the aim of the research unit is to develop a framework that can be used to structure and simplify the vast amount of accessible data on action control, and that also serves as a basis to generate novel hypotheses and predictions in the area of action control and beyond. In particular, the framework on action control can be used to describe related psychological phenomena from other research areas (e.g., perception, attention, learning, memory, motivation, emotion, language) in terms of S-R binding mechanisms.