CNS 2026 Q&A with Samuel McDougle
As a member of a Connecticut-based band, Samuel McDougle has many opportunities to display a range of motor skills on a regular basis, whether playing bluegrass fiddle, mandolin, or guitar. From his love of music has sprung a focus within cognitive neuroscience on how people learn and get better at motor skills – an area he sees as sometimes neglected in studies of cognition.
“Human neuroscience and psychology fields tend to focus on how our species is so great at specialized skills like language and abstract reasoning,” says McDougle, who is a recipient of the CNS 2026 Young Investigator Award, “but we’re also amazingly dexterous creatures with huge repertoires of motor skills. I think that’s groovy.”
In the Action, Computation, & Thinking Lab he leads at Yale University, McDougle investigates both how people build long-term expertise in motor tasks, as well as short-term rapid learning, through mental functions like “motor working memory.” One of the missing pieces in current models of motor skill learning, he says, “is the sometimes narrow focus on incremental, unconscious learning, which can neglect the huge role that cognition plays in guiding in our actions.” Building this broader perspective also means taking a new look at how neural circuits typically linked to motor control, like the cerebellum, contribute to multiple aspects of cognition, a topic McDougle will address in his award lecture at CNS 2026 in Vancouver.
I spoke to McDougle about his research, including how his lab goes about studying motor learning and some examples of recent studies, as well as what he is looking forward to at the CNS meeting this spring.
CNS: With motor skills so prevalent across different areas of daily life, why do you think the study of working memory in relation to such skills is under-studied?
McDougle: I think the common misnomer “muscle memory” is a clue: People tend to only think about motor skills that have been “crystallized” and have become mostly automatic. This is all well and good, but in the earliest stages of learning, which are critical, motor skill acquisition like most kinds of learning is very much a cognitive endeavor. And getting motor skills right is enormously complex; consider that we have AIs that can produce essays in milliseconds but we don’t have laundry-folding robots in our homes yet. I think the neglect of the cognitive-motor interface may mostly be a product of motor learning and motor control being primarily studied by engineers and biologists; this is great, but cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists have something to add too. My hope is that more cognitive neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists enter the field of motor behavior so we can bring more nuance into our models of motor learning.
CNS: How is your lab going about studying this type of working memory?
McDougle: As of now we are trying to advance the concept of “motor working memory” by using tools people have used for decades to study other types of working memory, and apply them to motor memory tasks. For now, this has been working well, and we are currently piloting fMRI and brain stimulation studies to try and reveal the neural correlates of motor working memory. One novel approach we are taking is to have people make complex, naturalistic movements and try to remember and recreate those movements later. What cognitive processes are involved with this type of memory encoding and recall? How do these processes subserve motor learning?
CNS: What about your work with the cerebellum? What is that finding and how does it connect back to working memory?
McDougle: Our understanding of the cerebellum has undergone a paradigm shift in the last few decades. While textbooks still describe the cerebellum as a “motor” region, it has become increasingly clear that it is much more than that, contributing to a wide range of cognitive functions, and even cognitive psychopathologies, including those related to working memory.
One idea my lab has been advancing is the notion that the cerebellum is a “generalized” prediction machine, helping to link our experiences in both motor and non-motor domains. Understanding how the cerebellum computationally contributes to non-motor domains, like reinforcement learning and working memory, is an important test of this idea in our view.
As for connections between our cerebellar work and our motor working memory work, I see two main connections, one specific and one broad. The specific connection is that I think the cerebellum may be a node in a putative “motor working memory network,” but this remains to be directly tested. The broader connection goes back to your first question – I think blurring the boundary between cognition and action will also mean redefining the functions of traditionally “motor” brain regions as also having key roles in cognitive computations.
CNS: Can you share any recent results from your lab that have been surprising?
McDougle: We have some recent work showing that expert piano players appear to parse sheet music in a manner that is strikingly similar to novices, but they just do it super super fast. To us, this suggests that expert perceptuo-motor skills may not involve a qualitative change between novices and experts, but primarily involve an extreme speed-up. We think this has interesting neural implications.
CNS: What are the next steps for your work?
McDougle: We are currently trying to better understand the neural correlates of motor working memory, using TMS and fMRI. Getting these circuits mapped out is a key next step for that project. We are also hoping to see if we can pinpoint specific cognitive cerebellar signals using non-invasive methods like MEG. The hope is that we can really get a good understanding of the broader computational function of the cerebellum.
CNS: What do you most want people to understand about your work? And why should they come to your award talk?
McDougle: They should come to my talk because I’m right after Monica Rosenberg, and she’s fantastic [watch this space for her Q&A]. What I hope people get from my work is that a) the cerebellum is actually the best brain area; and b) cognitive neuroscience textbooks should all have an “action” chapter!
CNS: What are you most looking forward to about the CNS meeting in Vancouver?
McDougle: Getting inspired and getting new ideas from people studying cognition that I can apply to studies of action. Also, the other keynotes sound amazing.
-Lisa M.P. Munoz
