Wouter Kool

🚨 WashU is hiring! 🚨 As part of WashU’s +AI Initiative, the search includes tenure-track opportunities in Psychological & Brain Sciences for people who place AI or machine learning at the center of their research. I'm on the committee, so feel free to reach out with questions. Please repost!

The deadline for this is in 1 week! Please apply, or circulate to people whom you think should apply!

Come be our colleague! Echoing Wouter, the AI bit is not rigidly defined. So if you’re interested, talk to us!

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...

A truly sad day for science.

Planning to start talking with potential postdoc candidates by the end of this week. The position is very open in terms of topic area. Let me know ASAP if you might be interested!

1/ I am thrilled to begin sharing the latest release of pyEM, a Python package I built for fitting cognitive computational models to behavioral data using hierarchical expectation maximization (EM) with maximum a posteriori estimation (MAP). github.com/shawnrhoads/...

Interested in doing a postdoc with me in Auckland, New Zealand? 🇳🇿 See info below on a competitive award opportunity, and please spread the word!

If you are at @facct.bsky.social, come check out the latest work of the freshly minted Dr. @ltreiman.bsky.social! She will talk about the effects of asking for AI training consent on human decision making. The talk will be Saturday 6/27 at 10.45 in the Human-AI Interaction session (Lamartine).

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.

Postdoc position available at postlab.psych.wisc.edu. Pls send cv to postle@wisc.edu

Reading a children's book about the brain with my son. The endsheets (<- I had to look this up) go unreasonably hard! Fun to try to figure them all out: I don't recognize the "Lungs" one. It's not obvious why these are in the book, by the way. It looks like it's just a tribute by the illustrator.

This is great advice on using AI for slide preparation. To throw in my two cents, I find that I construct most of my story while making my slides. The process of selecting graphs and crafting transitions lets me find out what works and what doesn't work.

Focus. Relax. Focus again. Turns out people would rather not do that! With my amazing mentors Wouter Kool and Julie Bugg, we show that people actively avoid switching between control states even in a single task, and trade off this demand against conflict. More in Wouter's thread and paper below!

I forgot to link the paper! 🤦‍♂️ I'm blaming my new four-month old. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Now out in Developmental Science! @noraharhen.bsky.social, Rheza Budiono & @catehartley.bsky.social @hartleylabnyu.bsky.social use multi-patch foraging to identify a specific computational role for structure learning underlying developmental differences in exploration. dx.doi.org/10.1111/desc...

There are still a few spots available for the Twelfth Model-Based Neuroscience and Cognition Summer School, which will take place from 10–14 August 2026 at the University of Amsterdam. Be quick — the remaining spots will be filled on a rolling basis, so make sure to register soon!

Check out this new study by the fantastic @rongbi.bsky.social in the lab 🥳 👇 Rong carefully analysed human effort traces to gain insight into how we form and update priors about required effort when effort is not signalled and has to be learnt in environments differing in volatility and noise.

Proud of this team for this multidimensional tour de force! By decoding EEG signal, we show that the brain handles competing distractors through rapid dimension-specific modulation based on a multivariate conflict signal. More in @davideghez.bsky.social's 🧵. Paper: doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.16.688701

@cathyzhang.bsky.social's paper on inferring mind wandering from behavior alone is now out in Communications Psychology!

Want to learn R? 📊 Join our NSF-funded "R Programming for Psychology and Neuroscience Workshop"! This virtual workshop is completely free and teaches junior scientists the basics of coding for data analysis. Apply by May 15th! rworkshop.missouri.edu #RStats #Psychology #Neuroscience

Thank you @ltreiman.bsky.social for sharing your work with us on how people act differently when they know that their behavior is used to train AI. In the ultimatum game, people are more likely to reject disadvantageous offers when an AI is watching and learning. 📃 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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.

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