Rate My Professor 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.