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The Journal of Cognition invites proposals for Special Research Collections, similar to special issues of traditional print journals. Special Research Collections should focus on an important topic within the scope of the journal, and should include at least three manuscripts (typically 3-6 contributions) with corresponding authors from at least three different universities. Proposals should include a working title for the collection, a brief case for why the topic is important and timely, and a tentative list of the special collection content (including corresponding authors who have agreed to take part, and working titles of papers, if available). Please send your proposal to MoreyC@cardiff.ac.uk.

If your proposal is accepted, the European Society for Cognitive Psychology will pay the article processing charges for the content. The proposer(s) of the special collection normally act as associate editor for submissions to the collection, with assistance from the editorial board where needed to avoid conflicts of interest.

To submit a proposal, please download, complete and return the application form.

Core mechanisms in Action Control: Binding and Retrieval

Guest editors: Andrea Kiesel (Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg), Lisa R. Fournier (Washington State University), Carina G. Giesen (Friedrich Schiller University Jena), Susanne Mayr (University of Passau), & Christian Frings (Trier University)

Please note that this collection is now closed to new submissions.

The special issue will focus on action control and its two presumed core processes, namely feature binding and retrieval. Action control is arguably one of the most important topics in cognition as humans interact with their environment by means of goal-directed behavior, i.e. by means of actions. Cognitive processes were developed and shaped to enhance preparation, execution, and regulation of action. Therefore, it is the current consensus that cognition serves action.

To date, research on human action control is comprised mainly of an abundance of paradigm-specific results and models. To gain a better understanding of action control, an integrative framework was proposed (the BRAC framework – for Binding and Retrieval in Action Control, Frings et al., 2020) that can explain a wide range of findings across different experimental paradigms by assuming two core processes as key functions in action control: feature binding and feature retrieval.

The first papers are now published and you can find these on the collection's webpage.

Journal of Cognition is excited to publish two new Special Collections, each collection comprise a series of commentaries that engage with an important topic that is explored in a central paper.

Our first collection, "Theoretical review with commentaries: Qualitative individual differences", expands on a paper by Jeffrey Rouder and Julia M. Haaf, titled "Are There Reliable Qualitative Individual Difference in Cognition".

Our second collection, "Situating Language in the Real World", is centred on a paper by Margherita Murgiano, Yasamin Motamedi, and Gabriella Vigliocco, titled "Situating Language in the Real-World: The Role of Multimodal Iconicity and Indexicality".

Read Theoretical review with commentaries: Qualitative individual differences here

Assumptions about whether individuals are more-or-less the same in some respect or fundamentally different is vital for theory-building in cognition. But can we tell whether the assumptions we make about individual variability are merited?

Read Situating Language in the Real World here

The collection presents a discussion of the proposal that we should broaden our lens from the study of language “as a system”, in which the focus is on speech or manual components of signs, to language “as situated” in real-world face-to-face interactions in which language comprises categorical components of speech and signs, and multimodal cues such as prosody, gestures, eye gaze etc.