School of Psychology and Psychotherapy

Chair of Experimental Psychology

Every second, we process a multitude of stimuli, only a fraction of which are relevant to our current tasks and goals. We can effectively suppress the processing of irrelevant visual stimuli by looking away or closing our eyes. In the auditory system, there is no comparable means of suppression, which means that noise and unwanted sounds have the potential to attract our attention and distract us. At the Chair of Experimental Psychology, we are interested in the cognitive modelling of the characteristics responsible for this disruptive effect, in order to distinguish between controllable and uncontrollable aspects of the processing of irrelevant information in working memory.

Successfully carrying out current tasks and achieving goals requires paying attention to relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information. Extensive research shows that older people often find it more difficult to suppress the processing of irrelevant information. Through our research, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of whether a general deficit in inhibitory attentional control is responsible for age-related differences, or whether the decline in performance depends on the modality and type of stimulus presentation. Preliminary results suggest that age-related differences are most likely to occur when target and distractor stimuli are presented in the same modality, whilst cross-modal selective attention processes remain intact well into old age.

Open science is an issue that is particularly close to our hearts here at the Chair of Experimental Psychology. In addition to measures to enhance transparency and reproducibility in our research (pre-registration, open data, open materials), we regularly participate in international collaborative projects focusing on the replicability of psychological findings and meta-scientific questions. We are part of the Psychological Science Accelerator and the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training. Current research projects focus on the psychology of sustainability, the effects of misinformation, and the public perception of scientists.

The cocktail party phenomenon is a classic finding in cognitive psychology and refers to the distraction caused by hearing one’s own name. Working memory capacity plays an important role in the occurrence of this phenomenon. Participants with low working memory capacity are more likely to notice their own name and make more errors in a masking task shortly after its presentation than participants with high working memory capacity. The age at which the cocktail party phenomenon can be observed in children has not yet been systematically investigated. Deficits in attentional control suggest that the likelihood of noticing one’s own name increases with the child’s age. Age-related differences in working memory capacity, however, appear more consistent with the opposite pattern of findings.

Searching for a target stimulus in the visual environment is an everyday task in the real world and a classic paradigm for studying visual attention processes in the laboratory. To this end, several visual stimuli are presented on a computer screen, and the task for participants is to indicate as quickly as possible whether a specific target stimulus is present or not. Reaction time and accuracy typically depend on various factors, such as the similarity between target and distractor stimuli and the number of visual stimuli on the screen. At the Chair of Experimental Psychology, we investigate the influence of task interruptions on visual search performance and the conditions under which top-down processing can help to reduce the costs of such interruptions.