What can be perceived as a chaotic world is most often experienced by humans as an orderly series of sensory events. Sensory receptors and cognitive abilities make this order possible in space and in time, thus leading to adapted behaviour. However, even after a century of research, and in spite of its ubiquity, time still looks like an obscure object of research in psychology. The purpose of this talk is to present some of the main questions, methods and ideas related to timing and psychological time. The analysis is mainly based on a psychophysical perspective, and the usefulness and limitations of internal-clock models for time perception research will be presented.

In everyday life, many of people's actions are patterned into sequences that are performed at particular times in customary places. In diary investigations, about half of people's everyday actions are habits in the sense that they are performed almost daily and usually in the same location. Repetition brings about shifts in the motivational, cognitive, and neurological bases for action. When initially goal-directed behavior is repeated, it comes to be cued by antecedent conditions. Repeated behavior also comes to be guided by slow-learning associative memory and brain systems that are separate from the systems involved in explicit decision-making and intentions. I will talk about these effects of repetition, highlighting the implications for (a) predicting habitual and nonhabitual behavior, (b) changing habitual behavior, and (c) experiencing volition and authorship of behavior.

Our goal is to understand the computational, behavioral and neural bases of associative learning wherein animals, people, and machines infer the causal, predictive, and relational structure of their environment. Our research seeks to relate the complexities and subtleties of animal and human learning behaviors to their underlying neural substrates and mechanisms. There are three main components to my laboratory: (1) Animal studies of classical conditioning, including behavioral analyses, lesions, and electrophysiology, (2) Human studies including behavioral analyses of healthy normal learning over the lifespan, neuropsychological studies of memory-impaired patients (with etiologies including early Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, stroke, autism, and schizophrenia), and structural and functional brain imaging, and (3) Computational modeling which provides the conceptual glue to build bridges between animal and human learning, and between psychology and neuroscience.

Four scientific questions define our research agendas:
(1) What does the hippocampal region contribute to associative learning?
(2) How does the basal forebrain modulate hippocampal function in associative learning?
(3) How do the basal forebrain and hippocampal region modulate stimulus representations in sensory cortices?
(4) How do the basal ganglia and hippocampal region interact during associative learning?
Although our primary efforts have been to address fundamental basic research questions, we have been increasingly drawn to the potential applications of our research to understanding, diagnosing, and possibly rehabilitating neurological impairments of learning and memory. Over the last several years, we have pursued an interdisciplinary research program to develop novel behavioral assessment tools for evaluating mild memory impairments following damage to the medial temporal lobes, key brain structures damaged in Alzheimer's disease. Our approach uses computational models of these brain structures to suggest novel ways of assessing the functional consequences of damage to these regions; these approaches are then tested in lesioned animals and human patients. More recently, we have begun to study the impact of dopaminergic medication on cognitive functioning in Parkinson's disease, identifying several areas where medication appears to impair cognition even while remediating motor deficits. This work has clear clinical implications for patient care. The global aim of this research is to better understand incremental error-correction learning in PD and how it is affected by dopaminergic medication.

Das Referat entwickelt unter Bezugnahme auf Kuhns wissenschaftstheoretische Konzeption zunächst den Begriff der paradigmatischen Untersuchung. Der Titel des Referats bezieht sich nicht auf die paradigmatischen Beispiele, die typisch für "normale" Wissenschaft sind, sondern auf Untersuchungen, die ein Paradigma abgelöst und wegweisend für die Psychologie geworden sind. Behandelt werden u.a. Untersuchungen E.H. Webers, Ebbinghaus', Bühlers (im Bereich der Denkpsychologie), Achs (Untersuchungen zur Stärke des Willensaktes und zur Begriffsidentifikation), Wertheimers (Scheinbewegungen), Köhlers (Transpositionsuntersuchungen, Problemlöseversuche an Menschenaffen), Zeigarniks, Sanders u.a. (Aktualgenese) Gottschaldts (Rolle der Erfahrung in Gestaltbindung), Brunswiks (Größenkonstanz) und späterer Autoren. Herausgestellt werden soll der Einfluss, den diese Untersuchungen für die Entwicklung nicht nur der deutschsprachigen Psychologie hatten und noch haben.

People management is more important than any other aspect of management in influencing stress, determining the performance of companies (in terms of productivity and profitability), hospitals (in terms of patient mortality) and teams (in relation to effectiveness and innovation). Good people management in organizations can contribute to overcoming wider social problems of alienation, depression, and illness. However this is the area most neglected by managers in private and public sector organizations.

In Europe, there is a major increase in alienation and depression, the breakdown of families and communities, social isolation, and a constant sense of pressure of time and money. Organizations contribute to this by creating anger and anxiety instead of optimism and confidence amongst employees. Work organisations are both part of the problem and potentially part of the solution and research in psychology suggests appropriate ways of finding solutions.

Workplace practices often force people to consume a lethal cocktail of threat, deadlines, pressured evaluations and imposed goals. Psychological research suggests we must challenge work designs that contribute to the rising levels of depression. People have to adapt to increasing change, trying to foresee changes while feeling threatened by the possible loss of their jobs. In particular, role clarity, supportive cultures, team work and leadership are key in organizations to creating a more human workface.

In this talk, I will provide a theoretical overview at the cognitive level of reading acquisition and developmental dyslexia across languages. Phonological awareness is a strong predictor of reading development, and develops at three linguistic levels. These are the levels of the syllable, the rhyme and the phoneme. I will develop the hypothesis that syllabic representation is basic to many languages, and that children's ability to recognise syllables and rhymes precedes learning a particular spelling system. I will argue that this developmental view can readily explain cross-language differences in reading acquisition. I will then argue that it can also explain cross-language differences in the manifestation of developmental dyslexia. I will suggest that some of the processes underpinning language acquisition are disrupted in developmental dyslexia, and that this leads to deficits in the development of phonological representation before literacy is acquired. This causes characteristic and persistent problems in tasks reliant on the phonological system such as short-term memory and speeded naming, and also causes later literacy problems. According to this theoretical analysis, dyslexic children in all languages should have an underlying deficit that impairs their acquisition of syllabic structures. I will suggest that a plausible candidate is basic auditory processing of the rhythmic structure of speech and nonspeech sounds. I will present evidence that rhythmic processing is impaired in English-speaking and French-speaking dyslexic children, and suggest ways in which this might impair the adequate development of the phonological system.

Das Jahr 2010 markiert nach den gegenwärtigen bildungspolitischen Entwürfen auch für die Psychologie einen möglichen Wendepunkt. Die spätestens zu diesem Zeitpunkt geplante Umstellung auf konsekutive Studiengänge beinhaltet für die Psychologie mehr als nur die Frage, ob und wie eine formale Umgestaltung althergebrachter Studieninhalte erfolgen sollte. Es ist absehbar und wünschenswert, dass sich an dieser Frage erneut die Diskussion entzünden wird, ob Psychologie wie bisher als ein Studiengang und damit als ein Fach zu konzipieren ist oder aber in Teilpsychologien zerfällt. Die weitgehend von der Bildungspolitik aufgezwungene Diskussion über konsekutive Studiengänge sollte zu einer aktiven Diskussion über die zukünftige Entwicklung der Psychologie in Wissenschaft und Anwendung genutzt werden und in eine vom Fach, nicht von der Politik bestimmte Gestaltung des Faches einmünden.
In der Mittagsvorlesung werden Perspektiven für absehbare und/oder wünschenswerte inhaltliche Entwicklungen des Faches entworfen, aus denen sich dann auch Modelle für das künftige Studium der Psychologie ableiten lassen. Dabei wird die These vertreten, dass die Psychologie, wie bereits in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, auch in Zukunft nur dann überzeugen wird, wenn sie sich auf ihre genuinen theoretischen und methodischen Stärken besinnt und aus der Position und dem klaren Bewusstsein eigener Stärke heraus interdisziplinäre Verbindungen eingeht, sowohl im wissenschaftlichen Bereich wie in der Anwendung.

Recent studies indicate that redundancy gain is larger when redundant visual stimuli are presented to different hemispheres of individuals without a functioning corpus callosum than when such stimuli are presented to normals.
This result is surprising, because the disconnected hemispheres of split-brains should be incapable of pooling information about redundant stimuli, and such pooling or "coactivation" is thought to contribute to redundancy gain. The surprising result can be explained by a "hemispheric coactivation" hypothesis, according to which both hemispheres contribute to the activation of a response: In split-brain individuals, both hemispheres are only activated (and, therefore, responses would only be fast) when stimuli are presented to both hemispheres. A formal model encapsulating this idea will be described, and preliminary experimental tests of it will be reported.

This talk will be concerned with the ways that clinical psychologists think about or conceive psychological illness and wellness. More specifically, it will be concerned with how clinical psychologists traditionally have conceived the difference between psychological illness and wellness and how they should conceive this difference. It will be argued that clinical psychology, at least as it is conceived and practiced in the United States, is based on an illness ideology that promotes false dichotomies between normal and abnormal behaviors, between clinical and non-clinical problems, and between clinical and non-clinical populations and that locates human adjustment and maladjustment inside the person rather than in the person's interactions with the environment and encounters with sociocultural values and societal institutions. This ideology consists not of a set of facts but a set of socially constructed assumptions. This talk will offer a deconstruction of the illness ideology and of its most important "vehicle"-the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder. It will then offer an alternative conception of wellness and illness and a corresponding statement of a new mission for and vision of clinical psychology. This alternative conception will be based largely on what we have learned from decades of research in social psychology about the nature of psychological functioning and dysfunctioning and about the ways in which people actively construct views of reality to fit their expectations, biases, desires, and needs. It will also draw upon ideas from the new "positive psychology" movement.