Sam Verschooren
@samversc.bsky.social
1.3K followers 550 following 25 posts
Postdoctoral fellow at Artctic University of Norway; formerly MPI CBS, Humboldt, Ghent, and Duke University External and internal attention; mind wandering; interoception and control over internal body https://samverschooren.github.io
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Some great news to start the week: our paper on ideomotor theory and voluntary control over autonomic processes inside the body (“interoactions”) was accepted in Psych Review!🧠💓🥳

With @mgblr.bsky.social and Marcel Brass

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

#PsychSciSky #cogpsych #interoception
OSF
osf.io
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
Nice things for the

**13th #MindBrainBody Symposium 2026**

happening under the hood 😊

Save the date: 📆 March 9-11, 2026 (Berlin and virtual)

Stay tuned for the call and announcement!

(For info about the last 12 MBBSymposia: mindbrainbody.de)

#interoception #neuroskyence
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
TIL that Dale invented the heartbeat counting task, not Schandry, and that it was known from the very first study that people underestimated their heart rate. It was orginally called a heart rate estimation task! journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2...
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
Happy also to chat about our Brain-Body Analysis Special Interest Group (BBSIG) pipelines for preprocessing and analysing ECG, PPG and respiration (soon), openly available and ready-to-use with BIDS data as Jupyter Notebooks 🫀🫁

Work of +20 wonderful collaborators! ✨

📑 Documentation: www.bbsig.de
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
In some way, it's trivial:

The #brain & the rest of the #body (e.g. the #heart) are coupled.

Yet, we spelled it out
w/ A. Villringer & V. Nikulin for current scientists (below)
w/ @martager.bsky.social @agatapatyczek.bsky.social @el-rei.bsky.social for future scientists bsky.app/profile/mart...
'Brain–body states as a link between cardiovascular and mental health'

by Arno Villringer, Vadim Nikulin & Michael Gaebler @mbe-lab.bsky.social @michaelgaebler.com @mpicbs.bsky.social sky.social

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
Interested in brain-body interactions but unsure where to start?

🎮 Choose your character

👩🏻‍🔬👨🏽‍🔬 Current scientists: a new review by @michaelgaebler.com A. Villringer & V. Nikulin

🧒🏼👧🏾 Future scientists (and people of all ages): our scicomm article with @agatapatyczek.bsky.social & @el-rei.bsky.social
In some way, it's trivial:

The #brain & the rest of the #body (e.g. the #heart) are coupled.

Yet, we spelled it out
w/ A. Villringer & V. Nikulin for current scientists (below)
w/ @martager.bsky.social @agatapatyczek.bsky.social @el-rei.bsky.social for future scientists bsky.app/profile/mart...
'Brain–body states as a link between cardiovascular and mental health'

by Arno Villringer, Vadim Nikulin & Michael Gaebler @mbe-lab.bsky.social @michaelgaebler.com @mpicbs.bsky.social sky.social

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
Bidirectional or integrated state?

Some food for thought about brain-body interaction in this concept paper by my supervisors Arno Villringer @michaelgaebler.com and Vadim Nikulin.
'Brain–body states as a link between cardiovascular and mental health'

by Arno Villringer, Vadim Nikulin & Michael Gaebler @mbe-lab.bsky.social @michaelgaebler.com @mpicbs.bsky.social sky.social

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
Nice, congratulations🥳
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
Check out our new article for young readers (ages 8-15) on heart-brain interactions and interoception! 🧠🫀

I had so much fun co-writing this with @agatapatyczek.bsky.social @el-rei.bsky.social with the support of @michaelgaebler.com ✍️

👉 Share it widely with curious young minds
Yay for #scicomm
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
New preprint! We are pleased to share our Hierarchical Bayesian framework for Interoceptive Psychophysics! Implemented in rstan, we provide a complete suite of tools spanning model comparison, parameter recovery, multifactor designs, power analysis, and more! 🎯 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
The deadline for submissions for the 2025 Neuroscience of Pure Awareness Prize (€20k) is soon: Sept 30th. For the best contribution to neuroscience that substantially advances our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the experience of pure awareness. For details, see screenshot!
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
the tldr of my thread is that, interoceptive sensing at rest has no relationship to mental health symptoms, and we think this is likely because we need to measure interoception during and after arousal, close in time to symptoms, with ecological measures.
Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇
Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation
Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...
www.medrxiv.org
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
I can't quite believe it – I got a new NSF grant! 😲🤯

I'm incredibly grateful to the program officers & reviewers for their dedication and efforts to keep science going 🌟👏🏼

So, I'll be hiring! Looking for a postdoc to study competition in memory-guided attention. See flyer for details! 🎉
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
🚨 PostDoc Opening 🚨 The lab of Klaus Oberauer is looking for a new postdoc, starting end of this/beginning next year. Research focus is #cognition, #workingmemory, #methods and #computationalmodeling or anything in that direction. I cannot highlight ENOUGH how great it is to work in this lab 🥰🤓
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
Imagine this at scale, unchecked: how is this not a fundamental threat to science?

(Also, this is a perfect example of how irrational and ironic it is for large publishing companies to use “AI” to generate content that is of a much lower quality than the human-created content they already own.)
Was looking into what Cognitive Scientists mean by ‘domain-general’ cognition, and then hit upon this. This is definitely NOT how we use that term.

Tip: read the last sentence to understand what went wrong here.

Sigh.
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
We moved our symposium to a bigger room so we have a few more extra seats available now! Join us September 10th for our symosium on "Flexible Definitions of Cognitive Flexibility"
shengjiexu.ugent.be/CoCoFlex_Sem.... Poster or talk submission deadline is in two weeks: July 31st!
Impressive review on the knowns and unknowns of how the brain switches between external and internal attention :) Many exciting questions left to answer!
Out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social now! Kia and I argue that attention research would benefit from a stronger focus on how the brain shifts between external and internal attention. We outline competing hypotheses, review existing behavioral and neural findings, and highlight open questions.
How the brain shifts between external and internal attention
Focusing on relevant contents to guide adaptive behavior is a core property of the brain. For decades, scientists have investigated mechanisms to anti…
www.sciencedirect.com
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
I'm preparing a public talk on the impact of digital technology on attention, and whether there is any evidence behind 'brain rot' (and help the public understand that researchers need public funds and support to work on this issue!). #cogsci, what message would you want the public to hear on this?
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.
Reposted by Sam Verschooren
If you're in Leipzig tonight, come visit us at Long Night of Science!

Come try out a heart and breath monitor, make some music with your inner signals and play with a live harpist :) along the way learn about how your lungs and heart are connected and some tips on how to train your nervous system!