Society for Philosophy and Psychology

The effect of ostensive communication on immediate and delayed memory of novel and familiar action patterns - Memory & Cognition Actions are often learnt incidentally by observing other individuals. How aspects inherent to the social context in which an action is seen affect action learning remains poorly understood. Here we st...

🚨Recent work by Cristina I. Galusca, Liuba Papeo & Luca L. Bonatti:

The effect of ostensive communication on immediate and delayed memory of novel and familiar action patterns

The Minds That Matter: How Robots’ Mental Capacities Shape Children’s Evaluations and Trust Abstract. Robots express a great deal of diverse human-like capacities, ranging from communicating in natural languages to displaying emotions to responding to physical touch. Here we examined the rol...

The minds that matter: How robots’ mental capacities shape children’s evaluations and trust

📣Recent work by Anastasiia D. Grigoreva Crean & Arber Tasimi

Children's Judgments of Possibility Align With Their Judgments of Actuality Children often say that possible events are impossible, and only gradually come to see these events as possible. For instance, they often deny that people could do unusual things, like own a pet pea.....

Children’s judgments of possibility align with their judgments of actuality

‼️From Mo Pabla, Andrew Shtulman & Ori Friedman

Empathy for and From Embodied Robots: An Interdisciplinary Review - C. Daryl Cameron, Alan R. Wagner, Martina Orlandi, Eliana Hadjiandreou, India G. Oates, Stephen Anderson, 2025 Several years ago, the world was stunned when the cute robot HitchBOT was destroyed. Does empathy for robots—sharing experiences and feeling compassion—make sen...

Excited to announce a new open-access EMP Lab paper on empathic AI: an interdisciplinary collaboration between psychology, philosophy, & engineering on motivated empathy expression and reception with social robots.
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Scientific or naïve? Perceptions of direct and indirect realism, and why they matter Philosophical debates about the nature of perception are standardly informed by an empirical assumption about folk beliefs: They assume there is such a thing as “the” common-sense conception of visio...

📣From Eugen Fischer, Keith Allen & Paul E. Engelhardt:

Scientific or naïve? Perceptions of direct and indirect realism, and why they matter

People can find their true selves outside moral pursuits Pursuing a life of moral excellence is often seen as allowing a person not only to live by good and just principles but also to live an authentic life…

People can find their true selves outside moral pursuits

⭐️Recent work by Jordan Wylie, Matthew Lindauer & Ana Gantman

The 2026 invited program features keynote talks by Jennifer Nagel and Barbara Landau. Invited symposia will explore contemporary debates and issues in mental imagery, partisan epistemology, and nature/nurture ⭐️

SPP 2026 Reviewer Volunteer Form Please fill out this form if you are interested in reviewing submissions to SPP 2026. Thanks for your willingness to put time into making this conference happen!!

Submissions will be refereed (typically by one philosopher and one psychologist) and selected on the basis of quality and relevance to SPP. If you would be interested in reviewing for SPP this year, you can indicate your availability here:

Graduate students accepted into the conference will be considered for the William James Prize. Some need-based travel stipends will be available

Submissions are open format, but must be no more than 750 words + one optional figure (to be submitted as a separate PDF file) and must be prepared for anonymized review. All submitters may be first author on only one submission (but may co-author any number of submissions)

Please submit an abstract by January 16, 2026 at 11:59pm EST in any area relevant to philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, or cognitive science. The submission portal can be found at: bit.ly/44irCaz.

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Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17
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We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!

Scientific or naïve? Perceptions of direct and indirect realism, and why they matter Philosophical debates about the nature of perception are standardly informed by an empirical assumption about folk beliefs: They assume there is such a thing as “the” common-sense conception of visio....

Scientific or naïve? Perceptions of direct and indirect realism, and why they matter

⭐️ Work by Eugen Fischer, Keith Allen & Paul E. Engelhardt

Children and adults think truth-seeking should prevail over partisanship

📣 From Joshua Rottman, Zoe Favilla, Nithyasri Ramaswamy, Caitlin Geller, Raluca Rilla, Nina Kegelman, Skylynn Coble, Jonathan D. Lane, S. Emlen Metz, Paul L. Harris & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Will Human-Animal Chimeras Cause Moral Confusion? Exploring Public Attitudes - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Recent medical research involving human-monkey chimeras, human brain organoids in rats, and the transplantation of a gene-edited pig heart and gene-edited pig kidneys in living human beings have inten...

Will human-animal chimeras cause moral confusion? Exploring public attitudes

🚨 Work by Katrien Devolder, Joshua Rottman, Qinyu Xiao, Guy Kahane, Lucius Caviola, Lauren Yip & Nadira S. Faber

Hiding discrimination in plain sight: The development of reasoning about disparate impact policies

‼️ From Aarthi Popat, Jamie Amemiya, Gail D. Heyman & Caren M. Walker

📣From Kerem Oktar & Tania Lombrozo:

How Beliefs Persist Amid Controversy: The Paths to Persistence Model

Challenges to Narrating a Multitudinous Self: Towards a Better Ethics of Code-switching - Topoi We motivate and lay out the broad contours of a research program, namely that of developing a systematic ethics of code-switching. Such an ethics will articulate the values and norms that should gover...

Challenges to Narrating a Multitudinous Self: Towards a Better Ethics of Code-switching

⭐️Work from Leda Berio & Daniel Kelly

Cross-national insights into moral expansiveness: Selective valuation of nature versus humans Previous evidence from limited U.S. samples has shown that people differ in how they morally prioritize the natural world versus human outgroups. Here…

Cross-national insights into moral expansiveness: Selective valuation of nature versus humans

📣Recent work by Kyle F. Law, Stylianos Syropoulos, Charlie R. Crimston, Ezra Markowitz, Taciano L. Milfont, Scott Claessens, Thanos Kyritsis, Quentin Atkinson, Brock Bastian & Joshua Rottman

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

🚨From Jay Naborn & Jonathan E. Bogard:

The Pick-the-Winner-Picker Heuristic: Preference for Categorically Correct Forecasts

How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime: Shifting scales and missing benchmarks in the study of moral judgment Moral judgment is central to both everyday life and cognitive science, but how can it be studied with quantitative precision? By far the most direct a…

How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime: Shifting scales and missing benchmarks in the study of moral judgment

🚨 Work by Vladimir Chituc, M.J. Crockett & Brian Scholl

Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating - Topoi Recent developments in the study of the hippocampal formation call old ideas of representation into question and are forcing a change in the way we understand the study of memory and navigation, openi...

Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating

⭐️ From Andrea Hiott

People Use Norms, Values, Codification, and Enforceability to Determine if a Rule Was Broken Abstract. Rules are essential for the successful coordination of large-scale societies, with official, codified rules (e.g., laws) proscribing behaviors for everyone in their jurisdiction. These rules...

People use norms, values, codification, and enforceability to determine if a rule was broken

📣 Recent work from Jordan Wylie, Dries Bostyn, & Ana Gantman

Historical and experimental evidence that inherent properties are overweighted in early scientific explanation | PNAS Scientific explanation is one of the most sophisticated forms of human reasoning. Nevertheless, here we hypothesize that scientific explanation is ...

Historical and experimental evidence that inherent properties are overweighted in early scientific explanation

🌟From Zachary Horne, Mert Kobaş & Andrei Cimpian

What people learn from punishment: A cognitive model | PNAS Authorities, from parents of toddlers to leaders of formal institutions, use punishment to communicate disapproval and enforce social norms. Ideall...

‼️ Recent work by Setayesh Radkani, Joshua Tenenbaum & Rebecca Saxe:

What people learn from punishment: A cognitive model

What predicts girls’ and boys’ political ambition? Evidence from the U.S. and China

📣Work from Rachel A. Leshin, Reut Shachnai, Yuchen Tian, Minghui Wang & Andrei Cimpian

The moral pull of “women and children” Victimized “women and children” are frequently featured in the media, yet the consequences of this phrase are far from clear. Across six experiments (…

The moral pull of “women and children”

🚨Work by Anastasiia D. Grigoreva Crean, Stella F. Lourenco & Arber Tasimi

Somebody Should Do Something Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from o...

Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change

📚From Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva & Daniel Kelly

Inverse option generation: Inferences about others' values based on what comes to mind Prior research shows that when people try to think of things, such as solutions to a problem, the options that come to mind most often are those that …

🚨Recent work from Jane Acierno, Clare Kennedy, Fiery Cushman & Jonathan Phillips:

Inverse option generation: Inferences about others' values based on what comes to mind

Contrasting guilty minds: Exposure to contrast concepts narrows conceptions of acting knowingly and recklessly

🚨From Christian Mott and Larisa Heiphetz Solomon