New paper out in JEP:HPP! 🚨
We showed that people flexibly and automatically use environmental cues to regulate attention, even when unpredictable, attention-grabbing distractors hit from multiple senses. Disruption was short-lived, and control bounced back quickly!
📃 psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...
Merve Ileri-Tayar
New modeling paper, spearheaded by Raphael Geddert and Seth Madlon-Kay, now out in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: "Modeling of control over task switching and cross-task interference supports a two-dimensional model of cognitive stability and flexibility".
Free read link: rdcu.be/epatc
Two new preprints from my group at WashU!
First, Merve @mileritayar.bsky.social tests whether people place an effort cost on switching between cognitive control settings. We find that people avoid switching between focused and relaxed attentional states.
osf.io/preprints/os...
Our recent review led by Julie Bugg is out in PB&R. We explore why advance warnings to pay attention often fail to improve proactive cognitive control in conflict tasks. We introduce the TEPID framework to explain this.
link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...
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!
Thrilled to announce our new paper in JEP: General!
psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
We show how proactive control declines while reactive control remains robust across the lifespan, using multiple measures of both in a novel Stroop paradigm. A very rich, open dataset for future modeling projects!
First post with my first publication of 2025! 🎉 "Does item-specific cognitive control operate at the item level?" is now out in JEP:LMC! As a group of item-specific control enthusiasts, we put this idea to the test—does it really work at the item level? Check it out here!
doi.org/10.1037/xlm0...
Changrun Huang
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...
New preprint!
Last year we showed humans adapt attention in a dimension-specific way when multiple things compete for attention. Now we read out the neural dynamics of this adaptation. doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.16.688701 w/ @mikefreund.bsky.social @theazalabak.bsky.social @wouterkool.bsky.social
We're organizing a symposium in Ghent on "Flexible Definitions of Cognitive Flexibility" on Wednesday, September 10th, with six exciting speakers: shengjiexu.ugent.be/CoCoFlex_Sem.... Registration is free, but seats are limited. You can also submit poster or talk abstracts by July 31st!
🚨Paper alert!🚨 Across 5 expts, @mileritayar.bsky.social's new JEPG paper shows that people explicitly avoid switching between attention control states. Using demand selection tasks, we find that people don't just avoid cognitive conflict, but also switching between congruent and incongruent trials.
