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Research Foci

Our research is centered around the question how humans control their actions on the basis of external stimulation or internal goals. We address this question both in the context of basic research – trying to understand fundamental underlying mechanisms – as well in the applied field of human-technology interaction, assessing action control in digital environments.

Researching basic principles of human action control, we are interested in the role of learning, expectations, and cognitive control processes in guiding human actions. That is, we, for instance, investigate how learning and expectations derived from it enable action selection on the one hand and attention allocation towards the consequences of one’s actions on the other hand. Here, we assess the allocation of attention to action consequences via eye movements to understand the underlying monitoring processes.

On the other hand, we aim to bridge basic research and its application in human-technology interaction settings. Digital environments provide both new challenges and create new opportunities for their human users. For instance, contrary to uncontrollable everyday settings with numerous stimuli vying for our attention and processing resources, digital environments can be designed to optimally support human action control and help us realize our goals. Our research focuses on ways to use basic principles of human action control to develop and provide such support in various human-technology interaction settings. 

Topic Key Words

Action Control, Cognitive Control, Associative Learning, Binding, Expectation, Predictability, Attention, Eye Tracking, Anticipatory Eye Movements

An overview of the research projects of the Chair of Human-Technology Interaction can found at Projects or via the research data base KU.fordoc. Information on publications of the Chair of Human-Technology Interaction are available at Publications, on the personal webpages of associated researchers, or via the publication data base KU.edoc.