Pre-Conference Workshop 2026
Representing Goals across Contexts
Workshop sponsored by SSM and Springer
Barcelona, May 27th 2026, Hotel Vincci Maritimo, Condal Room
Organizers: Julie Huang and Ruud Custers
SSM is delighted to announce that on the day before its annual meeting in Barcelona, it is organizing a workshop on “Representing Goals across Contexts”. This is the second edition of these pre-meeting workshops and they aim to facilitate progress on pressing scientific questions in the field of Motivation Science. SSM members and early career researchers are explicitly invited to join. The conference is sponsored by SSM and Springer, but we request a small fee of $50 for refreshments during the day.
Preliminary registration is possible through this link: Preliminary workshop registration. As the number of places is limited, we want to encourage you to indicate your interest in participating as soon as possible. If you pre-register before April 10th, we will send out confirmations around a week later. After April 10, pre-registration will remain open until the week before the conference if there are still seats available.
Workshop Description
The defining feature of goal-directed behavior is that behavior is not just a response to stimuli in the environment but rather guided by internal mental representations known as goals (Tolman, 1932). Prior motivational theories and frameworks have emphasized how goal representations rely heavily on stored knowledge in memory (e.g., Custers & Aarts, 2010; Huang & Bargh, 2014; Kruglanski et al., 2002), that includes information about outcomes, valance, and means. Stored knowledge alone, however, cannot explain motivated behavior in new or varying contexts, where links between actions and outcomes must be constructed on the fly and value may need to be recomputed. How then, are mental representations partly retrieved from memory and partly constructed in situ, as they must be in the reality of everyday goal pursuit? In this workshop, we explore what we see as next generation questions for the motivational field. Keynote speakers will present their perspectives that may help us understand how mental representations of goals are formed, retrieved, adapted, reconfigured, and updated, to facilitate adaptive behavior across contexts. Afternoon discussions aim to include all workshop participants and focus on clarifying constructs, identifying gaps in existing theories, and proposing potential processes to explain these gaps. The aim is to publish the various perspectives and insights from this workshop in a special issue in Motivation and Emotion invited by Springer.
Keynote speakers
Andreas Eder, University of Würzburg, Germany
Baruch Eitam, University of Haifa, Israel
Catalina Kopetz, Wayne State University, USA
David Melnikoff, Stanford University, USA
Julia Vogt, University of Reading, United Kingdom
Kaitlyn Werner, University of Tartu, Estonia
Ruud Custers, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Veronika Job, University of Vienna, Austria
Preliminary Schedule
08:30 – 09:00 Registration and Coffee
09:00 – 09:30 Welcome, Introduction, and Self-Presentation
09:30 – 10:15 Keynote 1 & 2 + discussion
10:15 – 11:00 Keynote 3 & 4 + discussion
11:00 – 11:15 Coffee Break
11:15 – 12:00 Keynote 5 & 6 + discussion
12:00 -- 12:45 Keynote 7 & 8 + discussion
12:45 – 14:00 Lunch break (lunch not provided by the workshop)
14:00 – 14:15 Introduction to the objective of the afternoon session
14:15 – 15:15 Thematic discussions in small groups
15:15 – 15:45 Round table discussion of insights from small groups
15:45 – 16:00 Coffee Break
16:15 – 16:45 Discussion about integrating workshop findings with Special Issue
16:45 – 17:00 Closing statement
Perhaps see you in Barcelona!
The defining feature of goal-directed behavior is that behavior is not just a response to stimuli in the environment but rather guided by internal mental representations known as goals (Tolman, 1932). Prior motivational theories and frameworks have emphasized how goal representations rely heavily on stored knowledge in memory (e.g., Custers & Aarts, 2010; Huang & Bargh, 2014; Kruglanski et al., 2002), that includes information about outcomes, valance, and means. Stored knowledge alone, however, cannot explain motivated behavior in new or varying contexts, where links between actions and outcomes must be constructed on the fly and value may need to be recomputed. How then, are mental representations partly retrieved from memory and partly constructed in situ, as they must be in the reality of everyday goal pursuit? In this workshop, we explore what we see as next generation questions for the motivational field. Keynote speakers will present their perspectives that may help us understand how mental representations of goals are formed, retrieved, adapted, reconfigured, and updated, to facilitate adaptive behavior across contexts. Afternoon discussions aim to include all workshop participants and focus on clarifying constructs, identifying gaps in existing theories, and proposing potential processes to explain these gaps. The aim is to publish the various perspectives and insights from this workshop in a special issue in Motivation and Emotion invited by Springer.
Keynote speakers
Andreas Eder, University of Würzburg, Germany
Baruch Eitam, University of Haifa, Israel
Catalina Kopetz, Wayne State University, USA
David Melnikoff, Stanford University, USA
Julia Vogt, University of Reading, United Kingdom
Kaitlyn Werner, University of Tartu, Estonia
Ruud Custers, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Veronika Job, University of Vienna, Austria
Preliminary Schedule
08:30 – 09:00 Registration and Coffee
09:00 – 09:30 Welcome, Introduction, and Self-Presentation
09:30 – 10:15 Keynote 1 & 2 + discussion
10:15 – 11:00 Keynote 3 & 4 + discussion
11:00 – 11:15 Coffee Break
11:15 – 12:00 Keynote 5 & 6 + discussion
12:00 -- 12:45 Keynote 7 & 8 + discussion
12:45 – 14:00 Lunch break (lunch not provided by the workshop)
14:00 – 14:15 Introduction to the objective of the afternoon session
14:15 – 15:15 Thematic discussions in small groups
15:15 – 15:45 Round table discussion of insights from small groups
15:45 – 16:00 Coffee Break
16:15 – 16:45 Discussion about integrating workshop findings with Special Issue
16:45 – 17:00 Closing statement
Perhaps see you in Barcelona!
Julie Huang and Ruud Custers (organizers)