Wouter Kool

Wake up. Make breakfast. Do email. Watch a murder. Go to a party for a 5 year old. Laugh with my daughter. See a different angle of that murder. Hear govt officials slander the victim. Play Barbies with my kid. Feed her dinner. Tear up at that victim reading last honors to a vet. Put kid to bed. USA

We should no longer trust data collected on MTurk
link.springer.com/article/10.3...

My guess is that other online data is going to drop in quality due to LLMs. This is going to be an existential crisis for the behavioral sciences.

The dictionary feels like I'm just here for the

Great opportunity for PhD applicants this year!

Interested in mind wandering, aging, and individual differences? Check out our new preprint! A fun collab with @cathyzhang.bsky.social Maddie Valdez, @wouterkool.bsky.social and Julie Bugg

Are the correlates of mind wandering consistent across younger and older adults?: https://osf.io/jvyr6

Thrilled that my poster on our new preprint won 2nd place at the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (@sjdm-tweets.bsky.social) conference!
Read the full paper here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

So proud of my grad student @ltreiman.bsky.social on winning 2nd place in the Best Poster Award at SJDM @sjdm-tweets.bsky.social 🎉! In a preprint of this work, she demonstrates how sequential comparisons and choice-induced preferences reveal two distinct pathways to the decoy effect.

Check out @theazalabak.bsky.social's cool new paper on model-based planning during foraging. She's applying for grad school this season, so keep your eyes out!

🚀 We are hiring! 🚀

🔍 Join us as a Postdoctoral Researcher (fully-funded) at the Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI in Munich.

Bonus: Lauren just put out her paper on the decoy effect. It involves a preregistered behavioral experiment and computational modeling! cdmlab.wustl.edu/papers/TreimanKool_DecoyPreprint.pdf

Two more posters from my group at Psychonomics and SJDM. This evening, @duyguyucel.bsky.social will present some brand new work on multidimensional reinforcement learning, and tomorrow morning @ltreiman.bsky.social will present her work on choice-induced preference in the decoy effect.

My lab members are presenting some awesome work at Psychonomics and SJDM in Denver! #psynom25 #sjdm25

We have posters and talks happening Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Come say hi!

Excited to welcome #psynom25 to Denver later this week! A couple travel tips ⛰️🌇
1) It's high altitude and dry here, DRINK WATER, take it easy your first day in!
2) From the airport, save $/emissions by taking the light rail 🚈 to Union Station, then rideshare/25min walk to the Sheraton hotel 1/

I'm excited to co-chair an #SfN2025 nanosymposium with the esteemed @neuronush.bsky.social on intracranial and behavioral readouts of neuromodulation for psychiatric symptoms!

NANO048: "Human Intracranial Recordings: Cognitive and Clinical Science"
Wed. Nov. 19 from 8-10am (🙃)
Room 23A

If you are at #SfN25, be sure to check out @davideghez.bsky.social's latest work on using EEG to decode the regulation of multidimensional control tomorrow morning. We're dropping the preprint tomorrow as well!

Obituary – Jonathan Smallwood

Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social was a beloved friend and mentor. He was taken from us too soon. His was a beautiful mind who understood the beauty of minds. As ever before, his kind voice guides me and his work will continue. We miss you Jonny. www.cbs.mpg.de/news/obituar...

Beyond thrilled to share that I've been selected as the winner of the 2025 Dean's Award for Graduate Research Excellence! So grateful to my incredible mentors, Julie Bugg, Wouter Kool @wouterkool.bsky.social, and Todd Braver, who made this possible.

More here!
artsci.washu.edu/ampersand/gr...

We’re hiring!

@sucholutsky.bsky.social and I are seeking a postdoc and RA for a project on trust in AI systems with folks at NYU, Princeton, BU, and Cornell

Positions open until filled. Apply soon! Please share 🔁

postdoc: apply.interfolio.com/175495

RA: apply.interfolio.com/175497

Come work with us! @princetonneuro.bsky.social and the Department of Psychology at Princeton University are searching for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the area of human cognitive neuroscience, to be hired jointly in Psychology and Neuroscience: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Postdoc Fellows The CTCN funds a cohort of outstanding Postdoctoral Fellows to work at the interface between theoretical and experimental labs and help forge new collaborations. Application deadline August 1st, 20…

The Center for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience at WashU is recruiting postdoctoral fellows. The Center offers a unique opportunity to craft a transdisciplinary research program with an unusual degree of independence.

ctcn.wustl.edu/postdoc-fell...

Dear #VSS2025 attendees! Our lab will be presenting 5 posters over the next two days. We’re excited to share our work: Come visit us!

Come see our VSS presentations!

Despite the world being on fire, I can't help but be thrilled to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science Program at Dartmouth in Fall '26. I'll be recruiting grad students this upcoming cycle—get in touch if you're interested!

Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!

Model-based planning in structured foraging environments: https://osf.io/8z3qv

Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure - Communications Psychology This study examines how event boundaries affect recall of items in a decision-making task. Events structured recall, which was impaired for items after boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showe...

This study examines how events structured recall, which was impaired for items after event boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showed that decision certainty predicts recall success.
@atabk.bsky.social @wouterkool.bsky.social @zreagh.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I dunno! In the paper, the link to the OSF is described as "containing more detailed information", but only has a vague description of the research question and it lists several questionnaires, roughly half of which do not get reported in the paper.

Yes, they did. I am considering emailing the editor to restate that I think this misrepresentation should be a serious enough violation to qualify for rejection.