Assistant Professor at WUSTL. PI of the Control and Decision Making Lab.
Wouter Kool
Loading...
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.
I forgot to link the paper! 🤦♂️ I'm blaming my new four-month old.
psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
Paper here: psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
and here: cdmlab.wustl.edu/papers/Ileri-TayarEtAl_2026_JEPG.pdf
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!
We even found that people are willing to trade off these two forms of cognitive costs: people are willing to take on more incongruent trials if it means they don't have to switch between congruent and incongruent ones types as much.
🚨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.
It was a joy to work with Merve Ileri-Tayar and Julie Bugg on this one. Not only do I think the avoidance effect is cool, but we also got to develop a neat new parametric flanker task with awesome behavioral interference results.
These results demonstrate that people explicitly avoid situations in which they have to reconfigure attention control (here from focused to relaxed and vice versa), consistent with recent work on "reconfiguration costs" by Ivan Grahek from the
@shenhavlab.bsky.social
.
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...
🚨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.
