Ian Phillips

Nice piece on our inattentional blindness paper.

Aphantasia reimagined How is it that individuals who deny experiencing visual imagery nonetheless perform normally on tasks which seem to require it? This puzzle of aphantasia has perplexed philosophers and scientists sin....

Free, share link here: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lLBO4sIRv...

And for the longer story, see my paper 'Aphantasia reimagined': onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Spared spatial imagery solves the puzzle of aphantasia

Short new piece on aphantasia just out in TiCS: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Key idea: aphantasia often involves a lack of *visual-object* imagery (explaining subjective reports & objective correlates) but selectively spared *spatial* imagery (explaining preserved task performance).

This is indeed a very cool preprint!

Book cover image showing a tree growing out of a white boat

Book contents page

Delighted to be the opening chapter of this brilliantly conceived (and beautifully covered!) new interdisciplinary collection on Space, Time, and Memory edited by the wonderful Lynn Nadel and Sara Aronowitz. Even better, the whole thing is free to download here: library.oapen.org/bitstream/ha...

Episode one: the disappearance Three years ago British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenous defender Bruno Pereira vanished while on a reporting trip near Brazil’s remote Javari valley. The Guardian’s Latin America corr...

Out now: the first episodes of our new six-part @theguardian.com‬⁩ podcast series about Dom and Bruno and the Amazon. Please do listen and share.
www.theguardian.com/technology/a...

Dog-sled going past the Le Château Montebello.

Main public room in Le Château Montebello decorated for Christmas. The building is the world's largest "log cabin".

Le Château Montebello is situated on the banks of the Ottawa river, separating Quebec and Ontario.

Group photo the school of 2018 at the Winter school on the Neuroscience of Consciousness

CIFAR invites applications for senior PhD and postdocs to participate in the Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School, held in Montebello, Canada Dec 10-12, 2025. The Winter School is hosted by members of CIFAR’s Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program. Please repost.
cifar.ca/next-generat... 🧠🧪

Super interesting, fresh way of thinking about dorsal/ventral streams, object tracking & aphantasia. View that aphantasia involves 'unrendered' amodal geometric imagery fits v nicely w/ what I've argued in recent work too, e.g., onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/..., philarchive.org/rec/PHISSI-5.

Thanks, Carolyn! No direct test of bound features being available I'm afraid. It's consistent with our results that there's only sensitivity to/awareness of basic ‘low-level’ or ‘pre-attentive’ features (though fwiw we did find a modest correlation between being sensitive to shape and to colour).

a gorilla is standing in the woods with trees in the background and looking at the camera . Alt: a gorilla is standing in the woods with trees in the background and looking at the camera putting its thumbs up excitedly

So, the inattentionally blind see more than we think! This is foremost v strong evidence of significant residual sensitivity in inattentional blindness. But, as we discuss, arguably our findings also suggest that although attention enhances conscious perception, it isn't required. 12/12

Data from Exp. 3 in which above chance sensitivity to location was found even amongst highly confident non-noticing subjects.

And this result even held when just looking at participants who were *maximally* confident that they hadn’t noticed anything. 11/12

Stimuli for Exps 4-5 in which a dynamic inattentional blindness was used and critical trial depiction for Exp 5. Data from Exp 5 showing above chance sensitivity to colour and shape amongst non-noticing participants.

In Exps 2-5, we used different coloured and shaped stimuli, as well as dynamic displays (closer to the famous gorilla), to probe if participants were better than chance at saying if the stimulus they’d missed was orange or green, circular or triangular. Again, remarkably, the answer was yes! 10/12

Results from E1 showing above chance sensitivity to location amongst non-noticers in inattentional blindness.

But could these 'inattentionally blind' participants say whether the line was on the left or the right when we asked them to choose? Yes! Remarkably, participants who said they didn’t notice anything unusual were significantly better than chance at saying where it was! 9/12

Schematic depiction of trial sequence in E1.

In Exp. 1, we used a version of Mack and Rock’s classic cross-task paradigm. Participants judge which of two briefly presented cross arms is longer. Then on the 4th trial, an unexpected red line appears on the left or right. We asked: Did you notice anything unusual? Approx. ~30% said ‘no’. 8/12

Might this conservative reporting hide awareness which participants’ actually have? To find out, we asked participants who said they didn’t notice anything unusual – people usually classified as inattentionally blind – a series of binary follow-up questions. 7/12

Figure showing how to calculate criterion from hit rate and false alarm rate in signal detection theory, and graph showing results from E2, 4-5 in which a conservative criterion was found.

This told us participants’ false alarm rate (how often they said ‘yes’ in absent trials). Together with their hit rate (how often they said ‘yes’ in regular trials) and some signal detection theory, this showed that – as predicted -- participants were indeed conservative in reporting noticing! 6/12

Figure showing critical present trials (in which am unexpected stimulus appeared) and absent trials (in which none appeared) in static (E1-3) and dynamic (E4-5) inattentional blindness.

For all these reasons a participant might be *conservative* in reporting their awareness. Remarkably, no-one has tested this. To do so, we tweaked classic IB tasks by adding absent trials where nothing unexpected appeared, but we still asked participants if they noticed anything unusual. 5/12

a close up of a gorilla 's face with its eyes closed Alt: a close up of a gorilla moving its eyes and scratching its chin thoughtfully

The problem is that there are many reasons why someone might *say* they didn’t notice anything unusual even though they did see something. Maybe they weren’t confident they saw anything, didn’t think it counted as unusual, or weren’t sure what it was (a shadow, a person, surely not a gorilla?). 4/12

But are things quite as simple as this: don’t attend = don’t see? Traditional studies of inattentional blindness assume that people don’t see the gorilla because people say they didn’t notice anything unusual. Well, what’s wrong with that? 3/12

But Did You See the Gorilla? The Problem With Inattentional Blindness The most effective cloaking device is the human mind

Inattentional blindness might just be the best-known phenomenon in psychology. And no surprise. It’s astonishing that when focused on a demanding task you can look right at something utterly obvious … even a parading 🦍! … and completely fail to see it. 2/12 www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...

Sensitivity to visual features in inattentional blindness As a group, inattentionally blind participants can successfully report the location, color, and shape of stimuli they deny noticing, and exhibit a systematic bias to report not noticing.

5 years since our first pilot, and 25,000 participants later, I'm super happy this work with Makaela Nartker, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and Howard Egeth on inattentional blindness is now out in eLife! A little 🧵 of what we found... 1/12 elifesciences.org/articles/100...

Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style?

In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

All of these and more can prompt concerns about reconciling the manifest image of perception with the scientific. And a good amount of my (and others') work is about exploring these kinds of concerns. 5/5

Vision science can also highlight or uncover aspects of perception which need addressing by the McDowellian/naïve realist, e.g., hallucinations & illusions, afterimages, phosphenes & entoptic phenomena, attentional effects, & just ordinary variation in appearances w/ change in perspective. 4/5

The local challenges being something like: naïve realism can’t handle some specific, allegedly empirically-supported feature of perception e.g., cognitive penetration, perception without awareness, perception for action, multimodal integration and so on. 3/5

That said, I don’t think an adequate defense can avoid getting somewhat into the empirical details. This is partly because challenges can be local as well as global. The global challenge being something like: naïve realism is inconsistent with the overall framework of vision science. 2/5

Craig French & Phillips Ian, ​Naïve Realism, the Slightest Philosophy, and the Slightest Science - PhilArchive

This is a v nice issue. I’m sympathetic to a McDowellian (or naïve realist) model & have defended something like it in response to Burge & others (e.g., here: philarchive.org/rec/FRENRT-2). I also agree it’s unclear how exactly experimental -- or more experimental -- work bears on the debate. 1/5

I don't think this what-it-is ('constitutive') question can ignore what goes on under the hood and so the science of perception. But it is in my view an importantly different question even so. 3/3

That said, some philosophical work (including some of mine) isn't about how perception works but about what perception is -- what all the neural activity & information processing yields from the POV of the perceiver themselves. 2/3