Brushing your teeth while checking the latest news on the mobile phone or grabbing a particular cup for your coffee from a cupboard holding many cups – the human mind constantly interacts with the environment and actions have to be coordinated all the time. But how does this interaction and coordination work?

We invented a new framework (Binding and Retrieval in Action Control; BRAC) that emerges around one core assumption: While executing an action, our mind combines the physical representation on which its acts – like a cup – with the response given to it – a grabbing movement – into a memory called event-file. This event-file can influence following actions as it can be retrieved from memory.

But how does our mind handle an event-file? Which conditions did lead to its construction? What happens while it is maintained? And how does it influence other actions? Are constructing, maintaining and influencing separate processes? And when does our mind discard an event-file?

We, an international team of 22 researchers from seven universities, tackle these and other questions. Our main goal is to shed light on the processes in the human mind that underlie execution of actions.