Visual working memory in action contexts

• Applicants: Dr. Anna Heuer; Professor Dr. Markus Janczyk
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 562579504

We spend most of our waking hours performing goal-directed actions, which profoundly shape what and how we perceive. While interactions between actions and visual perception have been well characterised, the impact of actions on the post-perceptual processing of visual information has received considerably less attention. Visual working memory, in particular, has mostly been studied as a purely visual function in spite of its designated role in guiding behaviour. Only in recent years has an ecological perspective emphasizing its action-oriented functions started to gain traction. This project aims at characterising the influence of an essential component of actions that has thus far been overlooked in the study of visual working memory: action effects (i.e., the perceptual consequences of actions). We will study both visual and non-visual effects of manual actions in three independent subprojects. The first subproject will focus on working memory for visual consequences of actions. The second and third subprojects will be devoted to understanding how visual working memory is influenced by the mere anticipation of previously associated action effects during action planning. This anticipation of action effects is an integral and well supported component of ideomotor approaches to action control. In each subproject, we will pursue one main objective, each broken down into more specific questions. (1) We will determine if visual input generated by a manual action is treated differently in visual working memory than other, passively encountered information. More specifically, we will establish if memory is generally better for action effects and if action effects are prioritised over competing visual information. (2) We will establish if actions influence visual working memory via the anticipation of their associated visual effects when there is a feature overlap between action effect and memory contents (e.g., both defined by colour). More specifically, we will determine if anticipated action effects influence the encoding of individual items, if items matching anticipated action effects are selectively prioritised during encoding and maintenance, and if the influence of action-effect associations increases with increasing uncertainty in visual working memory. (3) We will determine if anticipated non-visual action effects influence visual working memory via crossmodal correspondences. First, we will clarify if an auditory context biases the encoding of visual working memory contents via correspondences between the auditory and visual modalities (e.g., associations between pitch and object size). Then, we will – analogous to our investigation of visual action effects – establish how anticipated auditory action effects shape the encoding of individual items on the one hand and the relative weighting (i.e., prioritisation) of memory contents on the other hand.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants