William N. Koller

Today marks the last day of my internship at the Bedford VA - as of 4:30pm, I will officially have a Ph.D 😮! Grateful to all my amazing mentors throughout this journey and looking forward to starting a post-doc w/ @yaelniv.bsky.social in September focusing on latent cause learning x mental health!

Huge thanks to collaborators Joan Ongchoco, Michael Bronstein, and Brian Scholl as well as my mentor Ty Cannon for their contributions to this paper, which has been in the works for longer than my memory would have me believe :)

This work suggests that those who have more uncanny subjective experiences may uniquely struggle to remember *what happened when*, highlighting how breakdowns in associative/temporal memory might be connected to psychosis-like symptoms.

New paper out in JEP: General (open access)! Here, we find that those endorsing more psychosis-like sx (and more frequent/intense déjà vu) show a “hyper-recency” bias in memory, remembering stimuli as having been encountered *more recently* than they truly were. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

And finally, big congrats to Honor Thompson on her first co-first author publication! She put in lots of hard work on this thesis project and it's gratifying to see it get over the finish line.

So while we show sig. associations between these constructs, we can't say exactly *why* this is the case in this data. And, as always, people are multi-faceted and don't fit cleanly into boxes based on their politics, identities, etc.

Some important caveats: small sample (N=300), cross-sectional survey design (i.e., causality/directionality unclear), sig. variability within relationships (e.g., not every conservative-leaning person was concerned w/ status threat, etc.).

Conspiracy mentality, subclinical paranoia, and political conservatism are associated with perceived... Status threat (i.e., concern that one’s dominant social group will be undermined by outsiders) is a significant factor in current United States politics. While demographic factors such as race (e.g....

Excited to see this thesis project published! We explored demographic/psychological associates of status threat (concern that group status will be undermined by outsiders) and found pos. assoc. w/ conspiracy mentality, paranoia, and political conservatism. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

We take this as more evidence that those higher in positive sx are especially likely to misattribute signal to noise stimuli - and briefly speculate on neural processes that may underlie this bias (e.g., E/I imbalance in hippocampus)

New paper out on asymmetrical memory errors in schizotypy! In an omnibus sample (N=795), we found that positive sx and paranoia were differentially assoc. with "intrusive" memory errors (i.e., false alarms) - negative sx showed no such relationship. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #PsychSciSky