Candice Koolhaas

Can we boost hippocampal activity just by thinking the right thoughts? ​Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social , we show that contingent feedback helps refine & guide effective mental strategies 📈 ​Congrats to @s-vandelangenberg.bsky.social, @guygu44.bsky.social & team! ​📃 doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

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...

First human evolution lecture done and uploaded. I will put them all in the same playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Do the contents of visual #WorkingMemory deteriorate more quickly when more items are being remembered? Seems a straightforward question but we had to bring together 13 studies and >120,000 trials to get definitive answers... doi.org/10.1037/rev0... @ivntmc.bsky.social

We’re back with episode 2 of “A Conversation with a Future Luminary”! Jenna talks with UMass Boston graduate students, @ckoolh.bsky.social and @quinnpham.bsky.social about time management, working memory, episodic future thinking, collecting data in museums, and much more! itsinnate.fireside.fm/45

@quinnpham.bsky.social and I were on the It’s Innate podcast! Thank you @jennadistefano.bsky.social @jinjingjenny1.bsky.social @deontbenton.bsky.social for the opportunity!!! It was so much fun to chat about our PhD projects! open.spotify.com/episode/4l1w...

Thanks, but actually my favorite line didn't make it to the piece. Does Odysseus feel guilty about the Trojan war? Lots of discourse on this question even though he doesn't exist! Is he conscious? AI agents are fictive characters abstracted from text - like Odysseus.

🌈 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...

How good are you at inferring the correlation of a set of data points? Check out Daniel @lakens.bsky.social’s game (part of his “Improving your statistical inferences” book) and test (and hone!) your skill: buff.ly/hcOmPOU

So excited to share a new publication! Here, my advisors @zsuzsakaldy.bsky.social @erikblaser.bsky.social and I discuss the theoretical model underlying our recent projects on WM use across the lifespan, and we suggest a more ethological approach to studying WM. www.sciencedirect.com/science/chap...

Open Mind, the free OA competitor to Cognition (El$evier) founded by Richard Aslin, has nearly caught up to it impact-factor-wise Submit your best work! It's a great journal with fast and constructive review, a great ed board, and lots of cool work Open Mind is the future of cogsci journals!

Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe (@levelsof.bsky.social), on winning the Society for Philosophy and Psychology’s 2026 Stanton Prize and, more generally, for your rich research program demonstrating the origins of abstract, generative thought in human infants.

Have you thought of using unchained pupillometry to infer effort/arousal with _uncontrolled_ visual stimulation? Sounds crazy? @yuqingc.bsky.social shows that convolutional modeling of pupil responses with gaze-contingent luminance changes finally allows just that! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Update: my amazing RA Zane Mourad is no longer job hunting as he will be starting this summer as lab manager at the Infant Cognition Lab at UC Davis!! 🎉 he gifted the grad students these beautiful shot glasses with a pic from our CDS trip 🥲 simultaneously thrilled but also missing him already!

🎊New Lab Alert! I'll be starting at the 🧡University of Texas at Austin🧡 this August! More info to come. thesonglab.github.io I send my deep gratitude to my mentors, Monica @monicarosenb.bsky.social, YC @ycleong.bsky.social, ShiNung @shinung.bsky.social & Zach @zreagh.bsky.social, for everything.

Excited to share our new paper on how distraction affects memory retrieval. Using a continuous report paradigm, we show that distraction reduces whether memories are accessed but not how precisely they are represented. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Arrived to Florida a bit before VSS and enjoying a classic on the hotel balcony 😎

Psych-DS is spellcheck for your datasets, and it has an R package now! Available in beta now, made by the excellent Brian Leonard, instructions here: psych-ds.github.io/psychds-r/

New preprint! What happens in the brain when people offload memories into external reminders? Using fMRI decoding, we found that the corresponding neural trace fades until it becomes statistically absent. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵...

⚠️New review on video games for cognitive citizen science! "From Players to Participants: Citizen Science and Video Games to Understand Cognition" arxiv.org/abs/2604.24321

After hundreds of studies on the retro-cue effect in working memory, we thought that we understood what caused it. Not quite - check out our new paper: psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

Is anyone looking for a full-time RA starting in the summer who has an awesome personality, great work ethic, and experience with eye-tracking and cognitive development research? 🙂

I would have preferred to have the "draw the rest of the owl" meme on the cover, but this will do. Seems like it is on schedule, and we'll leave some typos so you know we didn't write it with AI.

Excited for #CDS2026 in Montreal! Check out our lab's posters on Friday and Saturday!

So grateful to have my first first-author publication out in Developmental Science! Here we (@zsuzsakaldy.bsky.social @erikblaser.bsky.social) used our Shopping Game to ask whether kids use all of their memory capacity if they don't have to (they don't! 🤭) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

New research from University of Waterloo Psychology researchers Adrian B. Safati (PhD student) and Dr. Daniel Smilek shows that simply expecting to think about our own thinking can actively influence how we regulate attention. Check it out: link.springer.com/article/10.3...

🚨 New #Review #Preprint 🚨 Veera Ruuskanen proposes a new, concrete framework to understand how and why pupil size 👁️, neural activity 🧠, and behavior 💃 interact. doi.org/10.31234/osf... #psychology #neuroscience #pupillometry #perception

Can We Process Information Without Encoding It into Working Memory? Our findings with @gidon-frischkorn.bsky.social and @koberauer.bsky.social suggest that processing entails encoding. Task-irrelevant information enters working memory during processing, impairing memory for relevant information.

Looking for your next weekend stats read?! @cribbie.bsky.social and I have written a tutorial on negligible effect/equivalence testing! link.growkudos.com/1ex872pua68

Neuroscientist @clionamurray.com knows the power of community. Murray explains how @blackinneuro.bsky.social expanded from its humble beginnings as a Slack channel to connect Black neuroscientists across the diaspora. By @alainaglevine.bsky.social #neuroskyence

Introducing “Pretend Battleship”: you’re told where all the ships are but then have to play like you never got that information. Could you do it? And what would your performance reveal about your understanding of your own mind? A joy to be part of this creative project led by @matanmazor.bsky.social

New on the Baby Blog - Could a toddler lose their keys? Proactive interference says yes by @ckoolh.bsky.social, Zane Mourad and @zsuzsakaldy.bsky.social infantstudies.org/title-could-... #infantstudies #EarlyYears #DevPsySky #PsychSciSky #science #research #memory

Now out in #ScienceAdvances: @baiweiliu.bsky.social and I ask how internal (goal) and external (sensory) selection are coordinated during visual search. The key insight: internal and external selection are not inherently serial, but may develop in parallel in the human brain: doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Conrad Hal Waddington was born OTD in 1905. His “epigenetic landscape” is a diagrammatic representation of the constraints influencing embryonic development. On his 50th birthday, his colleagues gave him a pinball machine on the model of the epigenetic landscape. 🧪 🦫🦋 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci #evobio

In an EEG study spearheaded by Marlena Baldauf, we show that 8-month-old babies’ visual systems resonate at 4Hz (theta rhythm) — unlike adults, who resonate around 10Hz (alpha). 👶🧠 echoes at 4Hz 👩‍🦰🧠 echoes at ~10Hz Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The cost of remembering: engram competition as a flexible mechanism of forgetting. Our new perspective piece in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social, lead by Ryan Lab alumni, Livia Autore. Also with Michael Drew from @utaustin.bsky.social Trends in Neurosciences www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Sad but true. Lessons here though. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Just added a few thousand new search datasets, bringing the total up to almost 6k museum visitors 😮‍💨 Updated preprint: osf.io/preprints/os... Data: osf.io/kf4sb/

Can infants tell when your phone is getting in the way? 📱👀 Cao et al. (2025) found that 20mo infants expect adults distracted by phones to do worse at simple tasks. Even babies may realise the consequences of multitasking! #infancypapers onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Now published in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social Open Access link: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

also from the meme archives

open.spotify.com/episode/5w35... 😻 the last ~10 minutes of this episode especially is so beautiful and inspiring 😱

If you have the intuition that Bluey is better for kids than popular kids YouTube streamers, you are right! Kids YouTube videos have way more “flicker” - an interesting measure Sarah Stolp Shepherd uses in her research that is related to reduced short term learning and EF! youtu.be/4whbKAhHMc8?...

Alexis Torres has written an excellent review, now published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, on "The Role of the LC-NE System in Attention: From Cells, to Systems, to Sensory-Motor Control" (w/ me and Gene Brewer). check it out! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Just had the chance to present on an @infantstudies.bsky.social panel about inexpensive methods for data collection with children - if you're curious about how Children Helping Science works/the kinds of studies you can run, this slide deck is a good place to start! docs.google.com/presentation...

Fitting a generalized mixed model with a gamma distribution log link and random slopes to reaction time data to arrive at precisely the same point estimate as the authors did by simply averaging and conducting a t-test:

First time at #vss2025 favorite conference so far for sure 😎🐠🐟🐡

My first #srcd poster on proactive interference with 1.5 - 2.5 year olds 🤩

First post! HW assignment for Biostats class. For #TidyTuesday I just compared how many times some random words appeared in the Simpson's-character-names dataset. Here is the link to the script: github.com/candicekoolh...