Since 2004 he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.

Academia Europaea; German Academy of Natural Scientist Leopoldina, Halle (Saale), Germany; Scientific Advisory Board of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, Germany; Advisory Board of the Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany; Honorary Member of the European Society of Psychology (ESCoP); Psychonomic Society; German Society of Psychology (DGPs).

Its core assumption is that actions are coded in terms of the perceivable effects (i.e., the distal perceptual events) they should generate[2][3][4] Performing a movement leaves behind a bidirectional association between the motor pattern it has generated by and the sensory effects that it produces.

Second, a common cognitive system predicts interference effects when action and perception attempt to access shared representations simultaneously.

Third, such a system predicts facilitation of action based on directly prior perception and vice versa.