Samuel David McDougle, PhD

Sam earned his PhD in psychology and neuroscience from Princeton University, and did his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. He runs the Action, Computation, and Thinking (ACT) lab at Yale's department of psychology. The ACT lab uses psychophysical, computational, and neurophysiological techniques to investigate human learning and memory, with a focus on the intersection of cognition and motor control. Recent work has focused on how motor skill learning involves an interaction between executive functions and low-level processes, on mapping and modeling this interaction, and on exploring its effects on decision-making and reinforcement learning. Sam also likes playing folk music (fiddle, mandolin, & guitar).