Project Details
Projekt
Executive functions: Are Amodal Representations Involved in Proactive Control?
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
since 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 381713393
A crucial aspect of everyday behavior is our ability to maintain goal-oriented behavior and to switch between controlled and automated processing rather effortlessly. Besides short-term, reactive adjustments to information processing, it is assumed that cognitive control implements also proactive mechanisms to configure the cognitive system in such a way that context-appropriate and efficient performance is achieved. We examine whether proactive control operates on amodal representations (i.e., stimulus-, response-, and task-unspecific). First, in sensorimotor conflict tasks, we investigate cross-modal and cross-task proactive control effects. If amodal representations underlie proactive adjustments, this should lead to domain-general transfer effects, and we plan to dissociate these proactive effects from those triggered by reactive control mechanisms (which appear to depend on more modal representations). A mathematical model will be used to further specify the mechanisms underlying these adjustments as well. Second, we aim to generalize our approach by investigating proactive control adjustments during language processing.
DFG Programme
Research Units
