News

Where we explore the possibility that aphantasia is unconscious mental imagery. Given aphantasics’ high performance, we propose thinking about aphantasia as access consciousness without phenomenal consciousness—which we call ‘blank access’. 

Jorge was interviewed by the editorial board of Stance—an international undergraduate philosophy journal. He was honored to be the journal’s 2024 interviewee, and feels grateful for the close reading of his work by the students.

Congratulations to our lab’s intern, Shivani Manikandan, who won the Steven Bailey Computer Science award for being the top Computer Science student at the Princeton Day School. Shivani is now heading to Vanderbilt where she’ll pursue a CS degree!

Congratulations to grad student Michael McPhee who was recognized with honorable mention in the 2024 NSF GRFP national competition. Congratulations, Michael, for your excellent and promising work!

A new paper is out in the 2023 issue of Philosophical Perspectives! The paper presents a framework for understanding the intensity of conscious experiences. Mental strength is the phenomenal magnitud present in all conscious states. It explains the state’s intensity and how our conscious minds self-structure. The paper traces back the origins of mental strength to Hume, Kant and James, and it shows how it can help us better understand the conscious mind. You can read a tweetprint or a blueprint (!), or click below to download the article.

The lab went to NYC to attend the 26th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). Krissy presented a poster about her project on training metacognition. Jorge gave a talk as part of the symposium “Broad-spectrum introspection” he organized. The symposium discussed the importance of expanding the study of introspection and metacognition to more domains beyond vision and memory. Jorge also had a chance to talk at a career panel. We all had a lot of fun!

Philosophers crashed vision science’s greatest party (a.k.a. VSS) for the third iteration of PhiVis. With talks on feature binding, perception of social features and attention, philosophers Jake Quilty-Dunn, Madeleine Ransom and Wayne Wu gave fantastic talks to a packed room. Comments by vision scientists came from Yaoda Wu, Isabel Gauthier and Ruth Rosenholtz. Jorge had a blast chairing the session.

New paper out in Current Directions in Psychological Science! In “Philosophy of Perception in the Psychologist’s Laboratory”, we discuss an exciting recent trend in perception science: taking philosophical thought experiments seriously and putting them to empirical test. We review several case studies: Molyneux’s question? Check! Hume’s problem of the perception of causality? Check! The famous tilted coin problem? Check! Ryle’s speckled hen? Check! 

New dispatch in Current Biology! Mental rotation is thought to require visualization of objects in 3D space. We discuss Stewart et al.’s groundbreaking results showing computations on 2D proximal stimuli—rather than 3D object representations in the mind’s eye—play a crucial role in mental rotation.

The Subjectivity Lab will attend its first conference this November—OPAM 2022—right here in Boston! Saurish Srivastava, our amazing high school research assistant, will be presenting his project “Scant Evidence for Domain-General Metacognition”. Saurish used his Python wizardry to ask a fundamental question: Are metacognitive mechanisms domain-general? To answer this question, he analyze hundreds of subjects’ data from the Confidence database, and the answer we found was: No, there’s little evidence for metacognitive domain-generality. Congrats Saurish!

We are thrilled to announce that this fall 2022 Michael McPhee will join the lab to pursue his PhD, and Dillon Plunkett will join us as a postdoctoral researcher. Michael is the current lab manager at the Ripollés Lab at NYU, and he is interested in consciousness, attention and metacognition. Dillon is finishing his PhD in Josh Green’s Lab at Harvard University, and he’s interested in questions about consciousness and representational format. We couldn’t be happier to welcome Michael and Dillon!

London-based artist Cathryn Shilling took the fMRI images from our Journal of Neuroscience metacognition paper and created a splendid art installation.