SHORT BIO

I am a psychological scientist, and I am curious about how human agents control their actions. Two topics are especially intriguing to me: The surprisingly complex cognitive mechanisms underlying initiation and control of overt body movements and, on a more applied note, human behavior and executive control during deliberate rule violations.

Previous publication include > 120 peer-reviewed articles as of May 2022 (h-Index 36) and has been recognized by a number of prestigious awards (see below). I have been able to secure grant funding of about 2 Million Euro and enjoy working with dedicated teams of post-doctoral and graduate student team members on these projects.

For additional details, please see my homepage at www.roland-pfister.net

Open Science Commitment: To promote transparent research practices, I provide full access to all raw data and analyses scripts as well as to custom-made computer programs on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/q48a9/) as well as on my private website.

SELECTED AWARDS

Rising Star Award 2021 of the Association for Psychological Science.

Bertelson Award of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, including an award lecture on the upcoming congress of the society in Lille, France, in August 2022.

Early Career Award of the Psychonomic Society including an invited presentation on “Rules and Behavior” on the virtual meeting of the society in November 2020.

Teaching Award („Golden FiPsi“) of the Institute of Psychology, University of Wuerzburg: 1^st place in the category Lecture 2017 and 2019, 3^rd place in the category Seminar 2017, 3^rd place in the category Lecture 2018.

Fellowship of the research group: „Cognitive Behavior of Humans, Animals, and Machines: Situation Model Perspectives”, Center for interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld (2019-2021).

Pre-registration Challenge Prize 2018 of the Center for Open Science (with Katharina Schwarz, Lisa Weller and Wilfried Kunde).

Heinz-Heckhausen young investigator award („Heinz-Heckhausen-Jungwissenschaftlerpreis“) of the German Psychological Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie, DGPs) – awarded bi-annually across all areas of psychology.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

* = mentored student co-author. A complete publication record is available on www.roland-pfister.net or my ORCID profile (0000-0002-4429-1052).

Deliberate rule violations:

Pfister, R., Wirth, R.*, Weller, L.*, Foerster, A.*, & Schwarz, K. A. (2019). Taking shortcuts: Cognitive conflict during motivated rule-breaking. Journal of Economic Psychology, 71, 138-147.

Pfister, R., Wirth, R.*, Schwarz, K., Steinhauser, M., & Kunde, W. (2016). Burdens of non-conformity: Motor execution reveals cognitive conflict during deliberate rule violations. Cognition, 147, 93-99.

Lying and negation processing:

Foerster, A.*, Wirth, R. *, Berghoefer, F. L.*, Kunde, W., & Pfister, R. (2019). Capacity limitations of dishonesty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(6), 943-961.

Foerster, A.*, Wirth, R.*, Herbort, O., Kunde, W., & Pfister, R. (2017). Lying upside-down: Alibis reverse cognitive burdens of dishonesty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 23(3), 301-319.

Action control and agency:

Pfister, R. (2019). Effect-based action control with body-related effects: Implications for empirical approaches to ideomotor action control. Psychological Review, 126(1), 153-161.

Pfister, R., Dignath, D., Hommel, B., & Kunde, W. (2013). It takes two to imitate: Anticipation and imitation in social interaction. Psychological Science, 24(10), 2117-2121.

Research methods and statistics:

Textbook: Janczyk, M., & Pfister, R. (2020). Inferenzstatistik verstehen. Von A wie Signifikanztest bis Z wie Konfidenzintervall [Understanding inferential statistics. From A as in significance test to Z as in confidence interval] (3^rd Edition). Springer.

Pfister, R., & Janczyk, M. (2013). Confidence intervals for two sample means: Calculation, interpretation, and a few simple rules. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 9(2), 74-80.

History of psychology:

Schwarz, K. A., & Pfister, R. (2016). Scientific psychology in the 18th century: a historical rediscovery. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(3), 399-407.

EDUCATION & ACADEMIC POSITIONS

08/2013-today        Research scientist, Julius-Maximilians-University of Wuerzburg, Germany

Habilitand (assistant professor) since 05/2014

10/2010-07/2013    PhD, University of Wuerzburg 

Thesis: „Breaking the rules: Cognitive conflict during deliberate rule violations“ (summa cum laude). Advisors: Prof. Dr. Wilfried Kunde, Prof. Marco Steinhauser (University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Germany). Supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation („Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes”), 11/2010-10/2012. 

09/2008-02/2009    Research internship, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom

BSc-thesis: "Expert's eye: Presenting eye-movement patterns to train visual search in complex geophysical displays". (Supervision: Dr. Anne P. Hillstrom)

08/2008-09/2008    Research internship, Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig, Germany (Psychology Unit, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Prinz).

04/2006-08/2010    Diploma studies in Psychology, University of Wuerzburg, and Georg-August-University of Goettingen, Germany

Diploma thesis: "Pinpointing ideomotor effect anticipations in the human brain" (research conducted at the Institute for Systems Neurosciences, University Medical Center at University of Goettingen; Prof. Dr. Oliver Gruber).

Supported by scholarships of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Max Weber-Program Bavaria (from 04/2008).

SERVICE TO THE FIELD

Associate Editor of the journal Psychological Research (since 10/2020).

Associate Editor of the journal The Quantitative Methods for Psychology (since 01/2017)

Guest Editor of two special issues on applied cognitive psychology in the popular science journal In-Mind Magazin (in German; issues 02/2014 and 04/2015).

Organization of the interdisciplinary TRACE-workshop in Cognitive Science. 2019 on “Intentionality and Agency”; 2021 (postponed due to the corona pandemic) on „Attention and Action“; with Thomas Camus, Romàn Josa, Katharina Schwarz and Diego D’Angelo.

Organization of the Autumn Meeting Experimental Cognitive Psychology [“Herbsttreffen Experimentelle Kognitionspsychologie] 2021; with Felicitas Muth and Katharina Schwarz.

Organizationof the first German summer school for PhD students in experimental psychology [„1. Doktoranden-Workshop Allgemeine Psychologie”] in 2012; with Markus Janczyk.

Organizationof international research symposia on deliberate rule violations and action control. E.g., “Acting in a complex world – Emerging perspectives on human agency” with Katharina Schwarz (University of Wuerzburg) and Nura Sidarus (Royal Holloway, University of London) at the 21^st Meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP; 09/2019).

Publication and maintenance of an R-package (schoRsch), which offers functionality to expedite statistical analyses for behavioural experiments.

Reviewing activities (Publons profile: https://publons.com/a/1589252/; > 50 journals; > 250 manuscripts). Selected journals: Behavior Research Methods; Biological Psychology; Child Development; Cognition; Cognitive Science; Developmental Science; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General // Human Perception and Performance // Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Memory & Cognition; NeuroImage; Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences; Psychophysiology; Psychological Research; Psychonomic Bulletin & Review; Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology; Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Reviewing for funding bodies, national: German Research Foundation (DFG); German Academic Scholarship Foundation; international: European Research Council (esp. for Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions); National Science Foundation USA (NSF), National Research, Development and Innovation Office Hungary (NRDI); National Science Center, Poland (NCN); Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).

INVITED PRESENTATIONS & INTERVIEWS

The following list includes Keynote Lectures, talks for non-academic audiences, and media interviews. It does not include invited presentations in scientific colloquia (currently: 20 presentations), as well as regular conference contributions and presentations on conference symposia (> 25 presentations), e.g., on the Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen (TeaP), the Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychologie (DGPs) and the annual meetings of the Psychonomic Society and the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP).

Keynote Lectures and invited presentations on interdisciplinary workshops:

08/2022      Meeting of the European Society of Cognitive Psychology. “Rule representation in the human mind”, invited “Bertelson lecture”.

11/2020      Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society(Virtual Conference). “Rules and behavior”, invited lecture for recipients of the society’s Early Career Award.

03/2020      Center for interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld, “Action-effect learning” as part of the workshop “Learning for flexible context-sensitive behaviour”.

02/2019      Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, invited presentation “Volition in action: Towards an agent-centred perspective on rule-violation behaviour”, as part of the workshop “New Ideas in Volition”, organized by Patrick Haggard (UCL) and Nura Sidarus (ENS Paris).

06/2018      Université libre de Bruxelles, Keynote lecture “Towards an agent-centred perspective on cheating and rule-breaking” on the “5. TRACE Workshop in Cognitive Sciences” on the topic “Normativity in Embodied and Situated Cognition”.

07/2017      University of Wuerzburg, Hot topic session “An agent-centered perspective on cheating and rule-breaking” on the “1st Summer School on Social Cognition and Neuroscience (SCONE)”.

09/2016      University of Freiburg, Keynote lecture on the Summer School of the DFG priority programme Multitasking (SPP 1772). „Ideomotor theory and its application to multitasking”.

Public presentations to non-specialist audiences:

11/2016      University of Muenster, Opening lecture to the exhibition on Ferdinand Ueberwasser (1752-1812) and scientific psychology at the Old University of Muenster.

07/2016      Tower of the senses, Nuernberg, public lecture on „Lying and cheating: A hands-on guide“, as part of the museum’s lecture series.

Interviews:

Selected interviews for national outlets: Wirtschaftswoche (03/2019), Forschung und Lehre (11/2020), Mainpost (11/2020), Bayerischer Rundfunk (12/2020), Deutschlandradio (12/2020), Main-Echo (02/2021), Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (03/2021), Clouds (DE/EN; 05/2021).

Interviews for international outlets:Weekendavisen (Denmark, 03/2017), Quest (The Netherlands, 07/2020).