Ian Phillips

Are there any reports of unilateral aphantasia? e.g. people who report being able to imagine things in the right hemifield, but not the left one?

@neddo.bsky.social's very nice commentary on @matthiasmichel.bsky.social and @smfleming.bsky.social's BBS target article also arguing that conscious perception may form fast even if postdiction suggests it only "vulcanizes" slowly.

Got the feet to fill Dennett's shoes? New junior position in Philosophy of Mind/Cog Sci at Tufts. philjobs.org/job/show/29606

The call for commentaries on our BBS paper is out now (deadline October 15): shorturl.at/Hu3Yu. In the paper (shorturl.at/4Rbk6), we provide recommendations and outstanding issues about designing experimental paradigms, analyzing data, and reporting the results of studies on unconscious processing 👇

A pleasure to engage with such a rich paper, and excited to see all the other commentaries as they come out! 3/3

I argue that postdiction is quite consistent with fast but initially partial and unsettled perception. Must such rapid and revisable perception overflow cognitive access? That's not obvious -- there's evidence access can be fleeting too! Nor is it clearly empirically objectionable if it does. 2/3

What does postdiction show about the speed of consciousness? In this forth. piece in BBS, I respond to @smfleming.bsky.social + @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's claim that postdiction shows consciousness is slow -- too slow for its purpose to be online action guidance. 1/3 philpapers.org/rec/PHIPAT-14

🚨🚨🚨 The Subjectivity Lab is looking for a lab manager! The position is available immediately. We want someone who can help coordinate our large sample fMRI study, plus other behavioral work. Because *gestures at everything* the job was approved only now (ends in June 2026). Great opportunity! 🧵 1/4

Larkin was right it seems... 😔

... Moore et al.'s study of 54 stroke survivors finds such biases are very rare, not unique to neglect, don't provide evidence of semantic processing, nor unconscious perception of any kind. Let's finally update the textbooks! 2/2

Burning houses revisited: Unconscious preferences not specifically associated with semantic content or visuospatial neglect Marshall and Halligan’s (1988) pioneering study of unconscious processing in visuospatial neglect is one of the most influential neuropsychological si…

Impressive new follow-up on Marshall and Halligan's (1988) classic case study of "blindsight and insight" in neglect. M&H's patient, PS, showed preference biases apparently evidencing extensive unconscious perception of semantic features ('flames'). But... 1/2 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Cover of Tony Harrison's A Kumquat for John Keats

Signed inside cover of Tony Harrison's A Kumquat for John Keats

RIP Tony Harrison. One of my prized possession, this copy of his wonderful poem, A Kumquat for John Keats. Every time I eat one, I'm reminded of it, and how a full life ought to feel. www.lookingtoleeward.se/tony-harriso...

Value theorists (very broadly understood): Hopkins philosophy is hiring! philjobs.org/job/show/29818

Adam Zeman's response to a quartet of letters regarding his brilliant review of aphantasia research. As he says, wonderful how much energy this young field has right now. Hats off to Adam himself for lighting the spark!

€3,000 essay prize on 'The philosophical implications of aphantasia/hyperphantasia', just announced by @bencenanay.bsky.social. Open to anyone who got their PhD after May 2018 and current PhD students. Deadline: Dec 1, 2025. Announcement and details: listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A....

Our new paper explores an analogy between representations of objects and representations of events, finding that similar illusions arise for both! Check it out 👇

Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

You will definitely not regret reading this fantastic new paper by my (and @chazfirestone.bsky.social, Hanna Pickard and Monique Wonderly's) brilliant student, Rui Zhe Goh. I learned a huge amount working with him on it.

Can we “see” value? Spatiotopic “visual” adaptation to an imperceptible dimension In much recent philosophy of mind and cognitive science, repulsive adaptation effects are considered a litmus test — a crucial marker, that distinguis…

Visual adaptation is viewed as a test of whether a feature is represented by the visual system.

In a new paper, Sam Clarke and I push the limits of this test. We show spatially selective, putatively "visual" adaptation to a clearly non-visual dimension: Value!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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