We have Prof. Dr. Dominique Muller, Université Grenoble Alpes, France, visiting us this week and giving a talk at the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology colloquium (talk title and abstract follows).

Approach/avoidance tendencies: A grounded cognition framework

How do people react toward a stimulus? An important and adaptive component of all possible reactions is whether they instantiate approach or avoidance. Often, however, taking too long to think about it could be dangerous or inefficient. To be effective, most approach and avoidance decisions need to be implemented very quickly. Instead of deliberating about whether to approach or avoid a given stimulus, one may simply retrieve the approach/avoidance tendencies triggered in past encounters with this kind of stimulus. In this talk we will adopt a grounded cognition to infer how these past encounters should be stored in memory. We will then illustrate how previous work fits with our framework and present experiments conducted in our lab that enable to test new hypotheses derived from this framework.