Samuel McDougle

Samuel McDougle is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University, where he has been since 2020. He also serves as Program Faculty in the Cognitive Science Program and Affiliated Faculty in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program and Wu Tsai Institute. McDougle earned his BA in Neuroscience and Behavior from Vassar College in 2009 and his PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience from Princeton University in 2018. From 2018 to 2020, he held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He directs the Action, Computation, and Thinking (ACT) Lab at Yale, which investigates the psychological and neural principles of motor behavior. The lab examines how neural systems supporting higher-level cognition intertwine with lower-level movement control, addressing questions such as how skills evolve from cognitively demanding to automatic, how abstract thought facilitates motor learning, and which aspects of motor skill rely on explicit versus implicit memory. His research employs behavioral experiments, computational modeling, neuroimaging, and neuropsychology to explore the cognitive-motor interface, with applications to rehabilitation, robotics, pedagogy in music, dance, athletics, and complex human mental functions.

McDougle has received numerous awards, including the 2026 Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award, the 2025 Yale University Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research, the 2024 Society for the Neural Control of Movement Early Career Award, the 2019-2020 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health, and the 2015-2018 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. His key publications include 'Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations' in Nature Human Behaviour (2025), 'Motor learning without movement' in PNAS (2022), 'Motor working memory' in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2026), and 'How does the cerebellum contribute to cognitive functions?' in PLoS Biology (2026). McDougle serves as Associate Editor of Open Mind and on the Editorial Board of Journal of Neurophysiology. He is an Elected Board Member of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement (2023-present) and has co-chaired workshops such as CoCoA: Cognitive Control of Action and the Motor Learning & Motor Control satellite meeting at Society for Neuroscience.

Professional Email: samuel.mcdougle@yale.edu