Sam Verschooren

Imagine this at scale, unchecked: how is this not a fundamental threat to science?

(Also, this is a perfect example of how irrational and ironic it is for large publishing companies to use “AI” to generate content that is of a much lower quality than the human-created content they already own.)

Does your smartwatch say you’re stressed? It may often be wrong Consumer grade smartwatches may not be as accurate as promised when measuring tiredness or stress. That conclusion is drawn by researchers Björn Siepe and Eiko Fried based on a comparison between smar...

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Press release @unileiden.bsky.social about our upcoming JoPACS paper led by @bsiepe.bsky.social, showing that the overlap of similar constructs assessed via wearable vs EMA data is surprisingly low (n~850, 3 months).

www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025...

We moved our symposium to a bigger room so we have a few more extra seats available now! Join us September 10th for our symosium on "Flexible Definitions of Cognitive Flexibility"
shengjiexu.ugent.be/CoCoFlex_Sem.... Poster or talk submission deadline is in two weeks: July 31st!

Impressive review on the knowns and unknowns of how the brain switches between external and internal attention :) Many exciting questions left to answer!

I'm preparing a public talk on the impact of digital technology on attention, and whether there is any evidence behind 'brain rot' (and help the public understand that researchers need public funds and support to work on this issue!). #cogsci, what message would you want the public to hear on this?

The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature “In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and…

The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature www.themarginalian.org/2019/05/27/o...

Impressive behavioral + modelling + eeg work, led by @lucvermeylen.bsky.social , relating time-on-task changes in comp parameters to changes in metacognitive reports!

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

If you're in Leipzig tonight, come visit us at Long Night of Science!

Come try out a heart and breath monitor, make some music with your inner signals and play with a live harpist :) along the way learn about how your lungs and heart are connected and some tips on how to train your nervous system!

Perceptual Decoupling Underlies Internal Shielding Benefit during Switches between External and Internal Attention: Evidence from Early Sensory Event-related Potential Components Abstract. People need to often switch attention between external and internal sources of information, that is, external and internal attention, respectively. There has been a recent surge of research ...

We have a new publication!!

Check out recent JoCN paper with @samversc.bsky.social @lucvermeylen.bsky.social @boevesam.bsky.social on how perceptual decoupling contributes to the "internal shielding benefit" during shifts between external and internal attention.

that’s Elon Musk FRS @royalsociety.org

New preprint (led by Nancy Wang, with Gilles Pourtois) in which we present EEG data of ppts switching between external and internal attention under hypervigilance manipulation🧠⚡

Findings replicate and integrate results from two previous studies on ext and int attention

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Perceptual Decoupling Underlies Internal Shielding Benefit during Switches between External and Internal Attention: Evidence from Early Sensory Event-related Potential Components Abstract. People need to often switch attention between external and internal sources of information, that is, external and internal attention, respectively. There has been a recent surge of research ...

Perceptual decoupling and internal shielding benefit: direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

Hypervigilance strikes a balance between external and internal attention: behavioral and modeling evidence from the switching attention task - Psychological Research Hypervigilance involves increased attentional scanning of the environment to facilitate the detection of possible threats. Accordingly, this state is mostly bound to external attention and as a coroll...

DDM evidence for impaired internal shielding during hypervigilance: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

DDM results replicate our previous study showing hypervigilance selectively impairs shielding efficiency of internal attention. Our novel ERP findings link DDM results to reduced perceptual decoupling, in line with our recent work finding that perceptual decoupling is involved in internal shielding

New preprint (led by Nancy Wang, with Gilles Pourtois) in which we present EEG data of ppts switching between external and internal attention under hypervigilance manipulation🧠⚡

Findings replicate and integrate results from two previous studies on ext and int attention

osf.io/preprints/ps...

"The moral of this story is that the finding of statistical significance is perhaps the least important attribute of a good experiment; it is never a sufficient condition for concluding that a theory has been corroborated, that a useful empirical fact has been established with reasonable confidence—or that an experimental report ought to be published. The value of any research can be determined, not from the statistical results, but only by skilled, subjective evaluation of the coherence and reasonableness of the theory, the degree of experimental control employed, the sophistication of the measuring techniques, the scientific or practical importance of the phenomena studied, and so on."

"The finding of statistical significance is perhaps the least important attribute of a good experiment...."

David Lykken (1968). Statistical significance in psychological research. Psychological Bulletin. doi.org/10.1037/h002...

NEUROCOG 2025 is taking place in Brussels Nov 17–18!

The theme: AI and the Human Brain 🤖 🧠

We’re thrilled to welcome 6 amazing invited speakers:
@evfedorenko.bsky.social, @nicoschuck.bsky.social, @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @jeffreybowers.bsky.social, @irisgroen.bsky.social & @mtoneva.bsky.social

Frank Zappa tried to warn us in 1986

New modeling paper, spearheaded by Raphael Geddert and Seth Madlon-Kay, now out in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: "Modeling of control over task switching and cross-task interference supports a two-dimensional model of cognitive stability and flexibility".
Free read link: rdcu.be/epatc

Invisible Gorillas in the Mind: Internal Inattentional Blindness and the Prospect of Introspection Training Abstract. Much of high-level cognition appears inaccessible to consciousness. Countless studies have revealed mental processes—like those underlying our choices, beliefs, judgments, intuitions, etc.—w...

A widespread view in psychology is that most cognitive processes are unconscious. In a new paper, I argue that many of these processes may evade consciousness for the same reason the "invisible gorilla" did: People fail to pay attention to them.

🧵

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

I'm happy to share my MSCA (from 2023), I'll send it to you :)

📢 Huge thanks to everyone who visited our EDIA poster at #VSS2025
We had a packed 4.5 hours of great discussions on XR research tools & eye tracking.

✨ Stay tuned, open-source release coming soon!
🔗 edia-toolbox.github.io

#XR #Research #Academic #OpenSource

We're organizing a symposium in Ghent on "Flexible Definitions of Cognitive Flexibility" on Wednesday, September 10th, with six exciting speakers: shengjiexu.ugent.be/CoCoFlex_Sem.... Registration is free, but seats are limited. You can also submit poster or talk abstracts by July 31st!

I had a great time at the NSAS on Interoception and Brain Disorders last week, so much exciting science and scientists!

Thank you @sarahgarf.bsky.social‬ and @skhalsa.bsky.social‬ for organizing and for the opportunity to talk about my research as well :)

#interoception #neuroskyence #nsas

When your heart isn't in it anymore: Cardiac correlates of task disengagement Neuroscience is beginning to uncover the role of interoceptive feedback in perception, learning, and decision-making; however, the relation between spontaneous visceral and cognitive dynamics has rece...

Mind-wandering is associated with late modulation of the heartbeat-evoked potential; mind-blanking is associated with greater decoupling of heart-brain phase coupling.

New findings from our radically-revised study of spontaneous cognitive & physiological dynamics

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What an amazing week on San Servolo on interoception and brain disorders; I learned so much, thanks all for the great discussions and thanks for the great organization and all the the fun! @skhalsa.bsky.social @sarahgarf.bsky.social

Excited to share this new preprint of a project I did with Klaus Oberauer 🕺 osf.io/preprints/ps...
In this study, we investigated the origin of the retro-cue benefit and observed that performance benefits because the cue protects against memory decay and test-display interference 😎 #workingmemory

I'm looking forward to give a talk at this great event👇
about scilaunch 🚀

shescher.github.io/scilaunch/

scilaunch 🚀 is a small convenience tool that I developed with the goal of easing the launch of new research projects, providing a useful skeleton for data, code, and organizational aspects.