General Psychology
Welcome to the homepage of the work group General Psychology at the Institute of Psychology of the University of Bremen.
In general psychology we are dealing with all people common processes of perception, cognition, emotion and motivation.
Our research focuses on researching how people make judgments and decisions. To do so, we explore what information humans use to make decisions and what cognitive strategies they use to integrate that information. In particular, we are interested in how judgment and decision-making processes are related to memory processes, how these processes change over the lifespan, and what implications these processes have for applied decisions.
If you would like to know more about our working group, you will find information about the team members in the Team section. In the research section, we present our main research areas. In the section Teaching you will find information about our courses and possible topics for qualification work.
News
Cogsci 24: We congratulate Ann-Katrin Hosch, Ludwig Danwitz, Vedant Shah and René Schlegelmilch on the acceptance of their papers "Category Learning in Context: Modelling an Assimilation Process in Self-regulated Category Learning", "Framing the Exploration-Exploitation Trade-Off: Distinguishing Between Minimizing Losses and Maximizing Gains", "XOR in Order: Category Learning of Exclusive-Or in a Temporal Sequence" und "Reward Count(s): Negative Recency in Probabilistic Experience-Based Learning" as full papers at COGSCI 2024 in Rotterdam.
Seitz, F. I., Jarecki, J. B., Rieskamp, J., & von Helversen, B. (2025). Disentangling Perceptual and Process-Related Sources of Behavioral Variability in Categorization. Perspectives on Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916241264259
Seitz, F.I., Albrecht, R., von Helversen, B., Rieskamp, J. & Rosner, A. (2025). Identifying similarity- and rule-based processes in quantitative judgments: A multi-method approach combining cognitive modeling and eye tracking. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02624-y
Danwitz, L., & von Helversen, B. (2025). Observational learning of exploration-exploitation strategies in bandit tasks. Cognition, 259, 106124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106124
Baumann, C., Schlegelmilch, R., & von Helversen, B. (2025). Beyond risk preferences in sequential decision-making: How probability representation, sequential structure and choice perseverance bias optimal search. Cognition, 254, 106001.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106001
Hosch, A.-K., Hoffmann, J. A., & von Helversen, B. (2024). Category learning processes in the light of variability: Insights from a self-regulated category learning task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001422
Current publications