Why do we often stick to one task even though a change would make sense? And why do we find it easy to rethink flexibly in other situations? A new joint research project between Osnabrück University and the University of Regensburg is investigating precisely these questions.
The project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with a total of around €770,000, is investigating how people structure tasks in their heads - and how these inner thought models influence whether we stay with one activity or voluntarily switch to another.
"In everyday life, we are constantly juggling several tasks. This reveals a fundamental conflict of objectives in our thinking: on the one hand, we want to remain stable and focused, and on the other, we want to react flexibly," explains Junior Professor Dr. Sebastian Musslick from Osnabrück University. Together with Prof. Dr. Gesine Dreisbach from the University of Regensburg, the cognitive scientist is investigating how this balance arises.
The project focuses on the question of how tasks are mentally represented. People can store rules as individual cases ("This word - this button") or summarize them in superordinate categories ("All red words follow rule A").
"Categories protect against distraction, but make spontaneous switching more difficult. Individual case knowledge is more flexible, but more prone to errors," says Musslick.
The project is now going one step further and, for the first time, systematically investigating how these thought structures influence voluntary decisions - in other words, whether we decide to switch tasks of our own accord.
To do this, the researchers are combining psychological experiments with computer-aided models based on artificial neural networks. Participants work on decision-making tasks on the computer and can choose which task to perform next in certain situations. The models simulate these situations and help to explain why people make different decisions under the same conditions.
The results are not only relevant for basic research, but also for education, work design and human-machine interaction. "If we understand how thought structures control decisions, we can create more targeted conditions under which people can switch better between stability and flexibility," explains Sebastian Musslick.
The project is scheduled to run for several years and is part of a larger research initiative on cognitive control and decision-making. It combines experimental psychology with modern computer-aided modeling and thus makes an important contribution to understanding human thinking in everyday life.
Further information for the media:
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Musslick, Osnabrück University
Institute of Cognitive Science
E-mail: sebastian.musslick@uni-osnabrueck.de
