Sam McDougle

News from central Jersey: I'm running to represent New Jersey's 12th Congressional District.

By entering the fray, I hope to bring ideas of repairing our frayed republic. Not only to defend it in 2026, but to build something stronger, for generations to come!

samwang.substack.com/p/entering-t...

I'm looking to hire a postgraduate research associate in Computational Psychiatry for my new lab at Yale. Please see link below for details & help RT 🙏

postdocs.yale.edu/posts/2026-0...

Exactly ❤️

🎸

Bob weir 😔

RIP

Come wash the nighttime clean
Come grow this scorched ground green

Ocean Warming Breaks Record for Ninth Straight Year - Inside Climate News Every second of last year, the Earth’s oceans absorbed the equivalent in energy to 12 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.  Global ocean heat content (OHC) increased for the ninth consecutive year in 2025, a...

Ocean Warming Breaks Record for Ninth Straight Year insideclimatenews.org/news/0901202...

Happy New Year, everyone!

Excited to share that our paper, “Goal uncertainty attenuates sensorimotor adaptation,” is now published in the Journal of Neurophysiology.

Huge thanks to our collaborators—Sritej, Bobby, and Reza @rezashadmehr.bsky.social.

Paper: tinyurl.com/yyfast5m

Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121.

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Founded in 2021, @yale.edu's Wu Tsai Institute 🏢 is advancing human neuroscience research by connecting cutting-edge neuroimaging, computation, and behavioral science to uncover how brain networks give rise to cognition 🧠

Read More 👇
news.yale.edu/2025/12/05/w...

Leveraging insights from neuroscience to build adaptive artificial intelligence Nature Neuroscience - Adaptive intelligence envisions AI that, like animals, learns online, generalizes and adapts quickly. This Perspective reviews biological foundations, progress in AI and...

Interested in the latest advances in neuroscience (neural dynamics and internal models) and how they can be leveraged to build smarter, adaptive AI?

➡️ My first real solo piece 🖤🫶 @natneuro.nature.com

rdcu.be/eWVmA

johnny rico in starship troopers saying “kill em all!”

I’m from Whoville, and I say kill the Grinch!

Preprint updated -->

Key new results: we found a brain-behavior correlation between performance on an RL task (under short feedback delays) and short-delay RPE signals in the 'cognitive' cerebellum!

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

PhD Studentship: Social Learning of Metacognition and Awareness at Birkbeck, University of London jobs.ac.uk now advertising a PhD Studentship: Social Learning of Metacognition and Awareness Visit jobs.ac.uk to apply and to browse more PhD opportunities.

I've got a fully-funded PhD studentship open at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social, investigating social learning about metacognition & awareness, w/ behavioural studies & neuroimaging (fMRI) - thanks to @leverhulme.ac.uk

More details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPV831/p...

#cogsci #neuroskyence

you're too sweet Phil 😊
also we're due for a cigar 😶‍🌫️

Taking Action Seriously in the Brain: Revealing the Role of Cognition in Motor Skills Samuel McDougle, a CNS 2026 YIA recipient, studies both how people build motor skills through mental functions like “motor working memory."

From Sam McDougle's love of music has sprung a focus on how people learn and get better at motor skills – an area he sees as sometimes neglected in cognitive neuroscience. Read a new Q&A with him, a preview of his #CNS2026 YIA talk:
www.cogneurosociety.org/taking-actio...
@actlab.bsky.social

Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost? The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.

Incredible piece on Oliver Sacks. If you were ever awed at his supposedly true stories (I remember being stunned by the account of the autistic twins who rattled off large prime numbers), read this. He told wonderful stories, but they were in large part fiction.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The Conference Where ChatGPT Wrote One in Five Reviews (Maybe) An AI conference was bombarded with complaints about peer reviews sounding AI-generated. Now the reviews are being reviewed.

NEW: An AI conference was bombarded with complaints about peer reviews sounding AI-generated. A startup jumped in with an outside analysis, estimating that as many 1 in 5 could have been ChatGPT-written. Chaos ensued.

Now the reviews are being reviewed.

www.chronicle.com/article/the-... #ICLR2026

What is Balance? A Vital Mechano-Regulation Paradigm Abstract. Within minutes of birth a newborn gnu or giraffe works to stand and walk, asserting postural balance and organised animate behaviour in an apparently goal-directed manner. In contrast, robot...

New paper out on @openmindjournal.bsky.social *

I propose balance is a core biophysical self-regulatory function, organisationally akin to thermo-regulation. Might seem radical off the bat, but by the end of the paper I hope you'll agree it seems pretty obvious.
doi.org/10.1162/OPMI...

The Journal of Neuroscience has updated its policy on supplemental material. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/information-authors#suppl

The Sensorimotor Superlab with @gribblelab.org and @andpru.bsky.social is a unique place to work and learn. We are now accepting MSc and PhD applications for Fall 2026. Join our awesome team at Western University... For application instructions see diedrichsenlab.org and gribblelab.org/join.html!

people are saying that Zekun Sun's research is awesome. (people are right.)

learn more about Zekun and her work here! zekun-sun.github.io

Key Takeaways:

• 'Atomic' actions contain meaningful internal structure
• Visual perception represents the event structure within atomic actions.
• Automatic perceptual action segmentation at brief timescales draws on both semantic knowledge and visual cues

There's a lot of fun details and experiments, including my favorite new control stimulus (which Zekun invented) - the 'spiralized stimulus' 😵‍💫🌀

Zekun asked how our visual system automatically parses brief ("atomic") actions. Strikingly, she finds that both low-level visual features (e.g., motion energy) and high-level semantics (e.g., discrete action 'phases') shape event perception during action observation

New paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :)

Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun

This was my lab's first foray into event cognition

gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

3 today —>>

11.17 | 1-5p | PSTR226 + PSTR226.05

Taylor McClure
Reaching Control: Movement Psychophysics and Neurophysiology + Selective attention in motor working memory

Chat with her at #Booth3724 on Tuesday from 2-3p to learn more about her work.

#KnowTogether #ScienceAtYale #SfN25 @actlab.bsky.social

YouTube video by Andrew Pruszynski Juliana Trach (Yale University)

Excited to share our latest Sensorimotor Superlab Journal Club. Juliana Trach joins us to discuss her latest paper with @actlab.bsky.social, now published in @nathumbehav.nature.com: Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations. youtu.be/6LlDYxDV8wo