Why are Visuo-spatial Representations Sometimes Weird? Rodrigo Garro Rivero, USC In cognitive science and philosophy, researchers hypothesize about the formats of mental representations via analogies to artifactual representations such as sentences, maps, pictures, etc. The guiding assumption is that if our mental representations were to be structured as artifactual representations, …
Factive Mentalizing and the Attribution of Desire Akshan deAlwis, Washington University Research on the extent of mentalizing – attributing and tracking the mental states of other minds – is highly heterogeneous. Some research indicates that mentalizing is fast, easy, and early developing, while other research indicates that it is slow, …
Why is Cognition Question-Sensitive? Juan Murillo Vargas (MIT) Author’s note: I no longer believe most of the paper’s claims. But I find the question interesting and worth thinking about, even if I think the answer I gave for it is no longer workable. I’m curious to hear what readers think! …
Humans see faces as beautiful: The role of superadditive mechanisms in determining visual content. Selina Guter, MIT Our conscious visual experience presents us with various features of objects: among others, their shape, color, and size. But what about aesthetic properties, like beauty? My paper argues that at least one kind …
By Sarah Robins, Purdue University Thanks to the Brains Blog for featuring some of the great work from the latest SSPP meeting this week. There are several ‘phil & psych societies’, so it feels worth kicking off the week with a note about what distinguishes the SSPP. The SSPP is, …
This week we are very happy to co-host a series of posts with the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, featuring work from this year’s annual meeting! Today, Sarah Robins will outline the mission of SSPP, and what makes it such a great venue. Then, the rest of the week …
This is the fourth instalment in our series of short interviews on the topics of artificial intelligence and agency. In the interest of both our guests’ and audience’s time, these interviews will be concise, but each is accompanied by a reading list to facilitate further exploration of the subject matter. …
