Sam Verschooren

🎉New paper out today in Nature Reviews Psychology🎉 with @mjdahl.bsky.social, @mariamaly.bsky.social, and @thiasmittner.bsky.social. We've been working on a unified framework for attentional states and the dynamics of transitions between them. 🧵

Bolsonaro's loss is not just a loss for Bolsonaro. It's a loss for Trump. For Musk. For Milei. For Netanyahu. For Farage. For Meta and Zuckerberg. For the meat barons, the fossil fuel corporations, and the rest of the neocolonial looters. And it is a massive win for humanity and the living planet.

Don't worry and read our recent publication!! Nan(cy) Wang, @samversc.bsky.social, Aurora Gasparello and Gilles Pourtois have just published a paper in Cognition and Emotion:

Does knowing that distractions are coming change how we use working memory? In two EEG experiments, anticipating interference did not change how strongly previously learned information was reactivated in working memory. doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

I’m very proud to share this work with you! Fiorella and the team spent a lot of time thinking deeply about recent results; why are interoception and mental health unrelated? We think the field must escape the “quiescence trap” to progress!

What is this ‘attention economy’? Is there really a market where people buy and sell human attention? If so, what’s wrong with that? New paper by Katharine Browne and me that argues: yes, there is an attention market and yes, there is something wrong with it. 🧵 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

2 yrs ago, I briefly laid out a new theory of how motivation works (AGH). Here, I expand on the problems AGH was trying to solve, why they are hard to solve, what my solution looks like, and how this should change our understanding of thoughts & actions. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵A few highlights:

2023: 8,039 proposals 2024: 10,360 proposals 2025: 17,066 proposals 2026: 21,627 proposals Something's gotta give

New preprint! 🎉 I analysed 1660 papers from 4 psychology journals and found materials sharing went from 9% of papers in 2015 to 82% in 2025, and these materials *do* get downloaded — a median of 135 times each. BUT shared code is often hard to run. doi.org/10.31234/osf... Let's walk through it 🧵

Get ready! *MindBrainBody Symposium* 2027 Keynotes are confirmed 🥳 @hakwan.bsky.social (online) @maramather.bsky.social @camillanord.bsky.social Hyeongdong Park Asya Rolls 📆 March 17-19, 2027 📍Berlin & online 📬 Submit by Dec 10, 2026 (!) 🔗 mindbrainbody.de (official announcement soon)

📣 Check out our latest preprint with @kianobre.bsky.social, spearheaded by the incredible @dxywei.bsky.social! Across four experiments, we compare the behavioural and neural signatures of selecting real-world objects in perception and working memory. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Come join my team at @uniofjyvaskyla.bsky.social! I have an open PhD position (3 years fully funded) for a project investigating interoception and mental health, using lots of fun methods (EEG, EGG, tACs, TMS). More info and applications here: ats.talentadore.com/apply/doctor... #NeuroJobs

Our task-switching paper is now out at Current Biology! www.cell.com/current-biol... We find that that our brains reset to a task-neutral state between trials, providing flexibility when the upcoming task is uncertain. RNNs also learn this strategy, but only when trained to switch tasks.

Good morning @ecvp.bsky.social! ☕If you are wondering how imagery and perception interact and compete, and how to quantify these competitive interactions in visual cortex with fMRI,🧠please drop by the poster session this afternoon and chat with me about my newest study (with @peelen.bsky.social)

Super excited to see our review out in TiCS! Here me & @cogsci.nl present the first comprehensive framework of the mechanisms driving relationships between spontaneous pupil-size fluctuations, neural activity, and behavior 👀🧠👩🏻‍💻 Spoiler: arousal is only one of at least four 😶‍🌫️ doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

PhD position (4 years, paid) on an NWO-funded project on the Role of Foveal Processing in Spatial Attention at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, supervised by Dr. Mieke Donk (main PI) and me! For more information: workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/ph...

🌈 New preprint! With Sage, Melissa, and Kia (@dynacog-lab.bsky.social, @scenegrammarlab.bsky.social, @kianobre.bsky.social), we explore how attention is divided across external perception and internal working memory - revealing a dynamic trade-off between these two domains. doi.org/10.64898/202...

Takuro Zama is presenting resenting at #CCN2026 (Poster B62 in Poster Session B)! Asymmetric Interruption Costs Reflect Transition Structure Shaped by Task-Neutral Attractors: 2026.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=7...

A deeply destructive and inexpert management consultancy class has emerged whose sole purpose is to shrink Anglosphere universities and to undermine their future - all the better to secure more work. democracyforsale.substack.com/p/inside-bri...

📢 PhD opening in comp. cog. neuro. in Toulouse: thalamo-frontal model of cognitive control. Modelling/EEG experience is welcome but not required. Application deadline: 8 Sept. 2026 Details: sdrive.cnrs.fr/s/eDrkeXfjdW... #CognitiveScience #Neuroscience #EEG #neuroskyence #compneurosky

Two time scales of adaptation in human learning rates doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

How about a jet-lagged live posting while I read? Trying to read this because I keep getting tagged in posts about it, but the first paragraph already contains synthetic text (a quote from Claude). I will skip that bit and persevere... www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The Cognition Group in the Psychology dept at Exeter are at risk of redundancy because "basic cognitive psychology research does not align with the current priorities of funding bodies" If you think this is overtly wrong and misguided, please sign this open letter docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

New paper out: Led by super grad student Jim Zhang and in collaboration with Greg Cogan, we review and synthesize Insights into the neural mechanisms supporting cognitive stability and flexibility from human intracranial electroencephalography. For free access: authors.elsevier.com/a/1nRYWY3M3p...

📣The July issue is live! Cover: The psychology of eating requires social context Also in this issue: 🔹Adolescent identity development 🔹Resilience interventions 🔹Transition dynamics between attentional states Read the full issue: go.nature.com/4b5Sw9h #psychscisky #cogpsy #socialpsy #clinicalpsy

Every single humans rights org — including Israeli ones — have been telling the same story. Given that Israel still bars journalists entry to Gaza, which in itself is bonkers, how about we trust any or all human rights orgs. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com The 2010 novel “Super Sad True Love Story” describes a world that feels very much like the one we live in today — hypervisual, looks-obsessed, post-literate. Our columnist Ezra Klein spoke to its author, Gary Shteyngart, about how he sees the world today.

More evidence, from a large-scale study in China, that using AI hurts learning if it undermines mental effort. When homework time drops due to AI use, so do test scores. Across studies, there is a clear theme: AI tutoring in support of classes is good, using AI to "help" with homework is bad.

I am looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join my lab at Sabancı University in Istanbul for a 2-year TÜBİTAK-funded position, with possible extension. Interested candidates can email me with a CV and a brief note about their research interests. More details on gunselilab.com soon.

Mental image vividness and aphantasia judgements are fundamentally compromised by overlooked definition problems link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Last week we organized the Experimental Health Research Conference in Tromsø, bringing together researchers from across UiT's Faculty of Health Sciences (uit.no/tavla/artikk...). Very lucky with @epanlab.bsky.social and Arno Villringer as keynotes and we even caught some (almost) midnight sun!☀️🗻

You can access a read-only pdf of the article here: rdcu.be/fnzid

🧵 Thread: Does the internet threaten democracy? I argue that it does in my latest piece in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie... Here's the short version. 1/9 1/10

#PuG2026 comes to an end. One of my highlights was presenting our pilot study using autogenic training to teach voluntary control over interoceptive rhythms, led by @samversc.bsky.social with @niketag.bsky.social @toninfrc.bsky.social @michaelgaebler.com 🧘🫀 #interoception #neuroskyence [1/3]

“A habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible,” the report concludes. “What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Morning #PuG2026 crowd! Mark your calendars for one of the first Mind-Body-Emotion talks by @martager.bsky.social today at 15:30

This Thursday at 3:30pm (📍HS 15) at #PuG2026 come hear about our six-week pilot study using autogenic training to teach people how to voluntarily control cardiac signals, based on Verschooren et al. (2026) 🫀 with @samversc.bsky.social @niketag.bsky.social @toninfrc.bsky.social @michaelgaebler.com

New paper with @paulm-k.bsky.social and Mark Stokes on how we switch internal attention between working memory contents. Beta-band oscillations tracked the magnitude and success of these switches. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1... #neuroskyence

Great work by Nancy Wang (not on bsky), published now in Psychophysiology! We provide neurophysiological and modeling evidence showing that a hypervigilance manipulation negates the internal shielding benefit observed in the attention switching task

Science is a team effort 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬 We’re grateful that some of the core values of our group - collaboration, open science and peer support - have been recognized through a shortlist nomination for the Best Research Environment Award 2026 by @jungeakademie.bsky.social & @volkswagenstiftung.de 🚀 👇[1/2]