Abstract submission for WMS2026 (July 14th-17th) is now open! If you are an early career researcher of working memory, please let us hear about your cool work by submitting your abstract (forms.gle/MccRLJC1xXQ3...). Deadline is May 31st.

Many claim memory biases toward percepts reflect corruption in sensory signals. We challenge this view by showing that ppl adapt their integration rationally w/ experience. w/ @timbrady.bsky.social Humans adaptively integrate memory and perception based on stimulus history | osf.io/preprints/ps...

I wrote up something that's been in my head for a while: psychometric methods alone can't tell us what cognitive tasks and their indicators measure. Correlating indicators across tasks is circular when constructs are defined by those same correlations. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵1/3

Tired of relying on accuracy & RT to study individual differences? Cognitive models go beyond task performance to estimate the cognitive processes driving behavior. We bring cognitive models to individual-differences research — with practical guidance on study design and data analysis.

📢 PhD position in the @cognition-zurich.bsky.social at University of Zurich I’ve been part of the lab for 7+ years, and it’s a genuinely collaborative and supportive place to grow as a researcher and do research on working memory and cognition 👇

We have a new PhD position at the University of Zurich to work on visual working memory. For more info see here: www.psychology.uzh.ch/en/areas/nec...

CodaNote: Collaborative Markdown/Quarto/Rmarkdown People were looking for collaborating on MD family files with knit rendering... I built this tool for CORE team, works like Google Docs. Opened it to all from internal use so everyone can use it. Feedback welcome! Try: codanote.vercel.app

New preprint with @chenyuli.bsky.social! We wrote a hands-on tutorial for applying the Memory Measurement Model (M3) to categorical recall data using the #bmm R package. It contains four examples, complete R scripts, and a parameter recovery workflow. Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper out in Psych Review: "Cognitive Constraints and Reward Environments Jointly Shape Memory Formation." We show that people strategically decide how to use their limited memory resources based on the expected reward of future events that might also need those resources doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

Super excited to share that our paper, “Multiple Partially Overlapping Neural Modules Orchestrate Conflict Processing,” has been accepted for publication in Imaging Neuroscience! 🎉 1/n w/ @tgro.bsky.social @manuelvarlet.bsky.social Edmund Wascher, Patrick Gajewski direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

The "Theory Paper Format" is a template for writing psychological theory papers, developed by the Taskforce Theoretical Psychology (Lorentz Workshop, 2025). Use it to structure your theoretical paper, or (for editors) consider creating journal space for theory papers doi.org/10.17605/OSF...

Theory matters in psychological science — but where does theory in psychology currently stand? We’re inviting psychological researchers for our survey to share their views on the state of theory. Overview: doi.org/10.31234/osf... Survey: forms.gle/Ct4qq4a4raun...

We’ve created an overview of the current state of theory development in psychological science (doi.org/10.31234/osf...). We're now conducting a survey on the topic to collect your views on the current state of theory development: --> forms.gle/Ct4qq4a4raun...

“we are trapping 21st-century minds inside 19th-century academic hierarchies.” This essay gets a lot right about problems with German science. I would add that the hierarchies and precarious contracts lead also to systemic abuse and scientific misconduct. open.substack.com/pub/realimag...

A sneak peak into hallway and lunch break discussion that we have at our lab: @gidon-frischkorn.bsky.social, @joschadutli.bsky.social, @philippmusfeld.bsky.social, and @koberauer.bsky.social wrote up what we think is a reasonable workflow for specifiying priors in GLMs.

@philippmusfeld.bsky.social , @joschadutli.bsky.social, @koberauer.bsky.social and I wrote up the result of three years of in lab discussions on setting priors in GLMs. Hope some of you find the proposed workflow and our recommendations helpful! #bayes #glm #brms #rstats

Research Assistant/PhD Candidate (f/m/d) Cognitive psychology, RWTH Aachen University, Germany The title od the project is “Bilingual flexibility: The impact of dispositional and situational language balance on bilinguals’ word learning of a third language”. Application deadline: 20 March 2026

Research and teaching assistant (PhD student) in Psycholinguistics / Cognitive Psychology / Methods, Institute of Psychology, Lausanne, Switzerland The Statistics in Psychology Team is looking for a highly motivated PhD candidate. Application deadline: 20 April 2026 or until filled.

Dr. Vergauwe and Dr. Lewis Peacock are an great mentors and scientists. I highly recommend Postdocing with them in Dr. Vergauwe's lab. A great opportunity!

💡New Preprint 💡 Can you trust effect size estimates from your Bayesian sequential design / optional stopping sampling plan? Yes, you can! In this simulation study, I show that effect size estimates from samples obtained via optional stopping with Bayes Factors are unbiased osf.io/preprints/ps...

Great first paper by one of my best friends in academia & the indefatigable @duncanlabuoft.bsky.social

If you are a visual #workingmemory researcher that has a dataset from a delayed recall task with continuous report (the ones using a circular response wheel) and want to share it, please drop a reply. Would love a link to both paper and dataset! See: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData

New paper with @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social now out in JoCN! "Real-world Objects Scaffold Visual Working Memory for Features: Increased Neural Engagement When Colors Are Remembered as Part of Meaningful Objects" doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

OSF has been misbehaving for me recently, a lot of "unexpected errors". Would be nice to see a simpler, less error-prone design.

Call for Submissions for the Theory Methods Conference 2026, September 30-October 2! theorymethodssociety.org/conference.h... We invite you to: 1) Submit your proposal: edu.nl/mj9x6 2) Invite your colleagues/lab/(PhD) students, and encourage them to submit 3) Share this post

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.

Postdoctoral researcher (80%) in Cognitive Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland The successful applicant will work with the head of the Cognitive Psychology Unit, Klaus Oberauer, and the Cognitive Psychology team. Application deadline: 20 March 2026

With a cool group of folks, we just posted a preprint about "The state and status of theory in psychological science". Very brief overview on the growing concerns about a theory crisis in psych, and an annotated reference list with publications about it split by concern osf.io/preprints/ps...

Briefly not attending something may help you remember it later 🪄: new paper led by phenomenal PhD student Frieda Born (not on Bsky) out now in Comms Psychology: 
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This work👇 is now published in PB&R 🥳🎉 #workingmemory link.springer.com/article/10.3...

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

This was such a joy!!! In this work, the brilliant @fridaprintzlau.bsky.social demonstrates the core features of VWM representations, namely its dynamicity and flexibility. TLDR: VWM dynamically shifts its representational geometry during maintenance depending on its task demand! What an ART!

New draft: "Decline effects, statistical artifacts, and a meta-analytic paradox". In this manuscript I show how a common practice in meta-analysis (eg the 2015 Open Science Collaboration) creates artifactual signatures of poor scientific behavior. PDF: raw.githubusercontent.com/richarddmore... 1/x

🚨New paper altert🚨 As a synthesis of my PhD research, we revisited the prevailing assumption about the mechanisms underlying repetition learning, and re-evaluated these assumption in light of recent findings. Now out in Perspectives on Psychological Science: doi.org/10.1177/1745...

"Repetitions lead to better memory." Sure - but how? Our new paper led by former lab member @philippmusfeld.bsky.social shines new light on this question, and challenges some longstanding assumptions. Now published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The ADAM lab is hiring a Research Specialist to join us! This role involves conducting human subjects research (EEG experiments on attention + working memory) and assisting with the execution and administration of ongoing projects. Job posting: emdz.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Make it your New Year resolution to add a #workingmemory dataset to OpenWMData so that we can curate our field's precious data, start testing theories and benchmarking models across datasets, conduct secondary analyses and meta-research using the data itself, and help me feel like I'm, like, alive.

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Our new preprint is out! Using a continuous-report paradigm, we show that divided attention reliably disrupts long-term memory retrieval by reducing accessibility—not precision. Two experiments + mixture modeling + TCC. Link: osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper out on value-based prioritization in visual WM. We used hDDM to account for speed/accuracy tradeoffs and isolate memory benefits from perceptual/motor benefits. We see perceptual/motor contributions suggesting that prioritization benefits are not purely mnemonic. Link: rdcu.be/eTUIm

Big news from the lab today: @joschadutli.bsky.social has officially defended his PhD! 🎉 We’re grateful to @aidanhorner.bsky.social for serving as external examiner and as Joscha’s supervisors we @leabartsch.bsky.social and @koberauer.bsky.social are incredibly proud—congrats, Joscha!

It was great having you @aidanhorner.bsky.social ! Thank you for serving as the external examiner on the defense committee of my (former!!) phd student @joschadutli.bsky.social ! Big congrats to Dr. Dutli!!

Is WM a gateway to LTM? In this registered report we find that higher WM load rarely impairs LTM encoding - suggesting WM capacity is not a bottleneck for forming LTM traces. @as-souza.bsky.social @edamizrak.bsky.social @cognition-zurich.bsky.social psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... [1/3]

Do you have an open working memory dataset and want it to be findable and reused? You can now add it to the Open WM Data Hub: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData! The collection of datasets tagged with useful metadata is steadily growing thanks to a small team of volunteers!

Thank you to everyone who came to the symposium! I'm also grateful to the people who have chatted to me about my talk on building a formal cognitive model that fits for the latent representation to then link to neural representation similarity. My talk slides: williamngiam.github.io/talks/2025_A...

New content: Souza, A. S. (2025). Refreshing Multi-Feature Objects in Visual Working Memory. Journal of Cognition, 8(1): 49, pp. 1–19. DOI: doi.org/10.5334/joc.... #psychscisky

In our new paper in Psychology and Aging, @koberauer.bsky.social, @leabartsch.bsky.social, and I investigated age differences in the Hebb repetition effect, and show that chunk formation is largely preserved in old age. Check it out here: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

PS is excited to announce the launch of "Individual Differences in Cognition” (IDIC), an open-access journal on research in cognitive psychology, science, and neuroscience. Co-Editors-in-Chief are Andrew R.A. Conway & Michael J. Kane. Manuscripts accepted this spring. More information coming soon!

I think almost all scientific projects should be planned carefully. And I think an app can dramatically improve that. So I wrote an app for that (free for now, if you can fund this let me know). I tested it quite a bit (>8000 users in beta so far). try it: planyourscience.com

Belated but hopefully still exciting #rstats news: bridgesampling version 1.2-1 has just arrived on CRAN: cran.r-project.org/package=brid... We now finally provide cmdstanr support (!) plus Monte Carlo Standard Error (MCSE), both thx to Giorgio Micaletto and @avehtari.bsky.social!