After studying psychology in Würzburg and Mannheim, he received his doctorate in Mannheim in 1995 with a dissertation on "Cognitive stress in speech"; in 2004 he habilitated at Saarland University. After several deputy professorships - including in Jena and Saarbrücken - and a research stay at Rice University in Houston, he accepted a W3 professorship for General Psychology and Instructional Psychology at the University of Erfurt in 2008. His main areas of research combine basic and applied research in cognitive psychology at the interface between learning and memory psychology.

He is also involved in basic research into the psychology of language and memory, such as the question of how the properties of objects influence the phonetic properties of the names of these objects.