Juan Murillo Vargas (@jimurillo98)

Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP)

🥁Now announcing the winner of the 2026 Stanton Prize:

Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social!

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

This honor will be celebrated at the upcoming meeting of the SPP

11.03.2026 13:29 👍 59 🔁 16 💬 1 📌 1

And the winner of the BJPS Popper Prize for 2025 is...

www.thebsps.org/auxhyp/bjps-...

#philsci #philsky

10.03.2026 13:53 👍 11 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1

Keynote speakers: Devon Bailey (University of Johannesburg), Louise Barrett (University of Lethbridge), Ali Boyle (LSE), Melina Gastelum Vargas (UNAM), Michael Kirchhoff (University of Wollongong), Yukie Nagai (University of Tokyo)

Call for abstracts for ISPSM’s 4th annual online conference. Philosophers working on any science of the mind (broadly construed) are welcome to submit. We particularly encourage submissions from underrepresented groups in the field.

It’s that time again! Delighted to announce the call for abstracts for ISPSM 2026 and our keynote speakers! ✨

Dates: 4-6 November 2026

Link for submissions: tinyurl.com/ISPSM-abstra...

Deadline for submissions: 31/07/2026

#philsky

09.03.2026 11:18 👍 11 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 0

Honestly many people with backgrounds in both philosophy and cog neuro still have way too strongly-held beliefs about consciousness

08.03.2026 22:35 👍 67 🔁 6 💬 5 📌 2

Philosophers have never successfully defined wetness. How do you know a climate model isn’t wet?

07.03.2026 22:49 👍 11 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 1

Mental representation without neural representation: Understanding the evidence | Philosophy and the Mind Sciences Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (PhiMiSci) focuses on the interface between philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. PhiMiSci is a peer-reviewed, not-for-profit open-access journal...

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Enjoyed writing this with the wonderful philosopher Bill Ramsey

06.03.2026 00:14 👍 16 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 1

If you (or your students) would benefit from a summer institute that features introductory courses in theoretical linguistics and analytic philosophy, consider YALP, taking place June 29 - July 10 in Yerevan, Armenia. Spread the word!

linguistlist.org/issues/37-697

sites.google.com/view/yalp201...

19.02.2026 19:11 👍 1 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0

New theory of #consciousness just dropped… 👀

03.03.2026 13:10 👍 20 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0

Please make a terrible ruckus about this, if you live in Oregon

01.03.2026 21:49 👍 388 🔁 292 💬 7 📌 5

The Nature of Belief Abstract. This book explores the fundamental and complex nature of belief, addressing various philosophical questions surrounding its essence. It examines

New and free online: @msgjonhere.bsky.social
& my edited collection of essays on belief with Oxford University Press:
academic.oup.com/book/62410

Table of Contents in thread

01.03.2026 17:46 👍 67 🔁 22 💬 4 📌 5

Autism and the Pseudoscience of Mind The theory-of-mind-deficit explanation of autism proposes that autistics lack a theory of mind, that autism comprises a theory-of-mind deficit (strong version); or, that autistics often have diffic...

Just published in Psychological Inquiry!

I offer a sustained philosophical and empirical critique of the theory-of-mind-deficit explanation of autism.

The ultimate conclusion is that the research programme has become degenerative—and therefore pseudoscientific.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

27.02.2026 16:16 👍 29 🔁 18 💬 2 📌 2

Ergo, or as I like to call it, the millennial's Phil Imprint

26.02.2026 18:00 👍 19 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1

The role of epistemic reasoning in mutual exclusivity inferences When encountering a novel word, adults and children as young as 12 months old often reason that it refers to a novel object rather than one with an ex…

Check out my new paper with @drbarner.bsky.social in JECP! We asked whether mutual exclusivity inferences involve epistemic reasoning about what a speaker knows, and whether children can infer speakers' knowledge of words from linguistic conventionality. (1/7) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

27.02.2026 02:41 👍 19 🔁 6 💬 1 📌 1

The Man Who Stole Infinity | Quanta Magazine In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism.

One of the most infamous results in mathematics was plagiarized www.quantamagazine.org/the-man-who-...

26.02.2026 12:08 👍 8 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0

Intuitive theories of truth Cognitive science has recently begun exploring how people conceptualize and reason about truth. We offer the field a framework that can guide inquiry …

New paper: Intuitive theories of truth

We connect philosophical theories of truth with cognitive science. We suggest new avenues for research around questions of how people judge statements as truth apt, what makes them true, and whether to assert something as true.

Check it out!

26.02.2026 01:16 👍 67 🔁 13 💬 2 📌 2

you can learn about the limits of empiricism the was way (read fodor) or the hard way (spend trillions of dollars and raze the environment and media landscape)

25.02.2026 22:25 👍 8 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Do Great Apes Know Each Other's Names? Probing Great Ape Comprehension of Social Vocal Labels — Animal Behavior and Cognition

New article out exploring great ape name recognition! We find partial evidence that zoo-living chimps & bonobos know each other's names 👀 Huge thanks to Animal Behavior and Cognition (a great open-access journal) & co-authors for your collaboration!🎉🐵

unsvr1.com/web/abc/work...

25.02.2026 22:29 👍 51 🔁 18 💬 0 📌 1

APA PsycNet

📣Recent work from Kevin Lande & E.J. Green:

Reconsidering the Role of Imagery in Perception

25.02.2026 13:53 👍 8 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1

lots of good points have already been made on using AI Agents for cheating (e.g. the latest Canvas-bot), it degrades learning, etc.

One additional thing I'd like to point out: if you use this stuff, you're not being clever, you're just an asshole.

to explain:

25.02.2026 13:44 👍 69 🔁 21 💬 1 📌 4

Excited to see this Version Of Record of my work out in @elife.bsky.social!
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
We investigate the mental representation of geometric shapes in adults and children using fMRI and MEG. Each figure has a video of me explaining the figure: go and read it, or read below.

22.01.2026 18:29 👍 42 🔁 15 💬 1 📌 3

OSF

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:

The Deliberation Taboo

Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/

osf.io/preprints/ps...

24.02.2026 13:53 👍 139 🔁 52 💬 4 📌 11

Redirecting

Origins of understanding fair resource collection
 ⭐️Recent work by Mia Radovanovic, Jaemin Hwang, David M. Sobel & Jessica A. Sommerville

23.02.2026 00:48 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

OSF

New preprint with @SamJung @timbrady.bsky.social and @violastoermer.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Here we uncover what might be driving the “meaningfulness benefit” in visual working memory. Studies show that real objects are remembered better in VWM tasks than abstract stimuli. But why? 1/

09.02.2026 21:06 👍 41 🔁 24 💬 1 📌 0

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

19.02.2026 19:20 👍 338 🔁 125 💬 13 📌 41

Children Understand How Adults’ Achievement Goals Drive Actions AbstractAdults often hold different goals for children’s achievement: Sometimes they want a child to learn and develop their skills as much as possible (i.e., a learning goal), while other times they may forego a child’s learning in favor of successful performance (i.e., a performance goal). How do children think these achievement goals influence adults’ child-directed behaviors? Across two preregistered experiments (n = 90 adults; n = 160 5- to 8-year-old children), we found that children systematically predict that an adult would select a more difficult task for a recipient child when the adult held a learning (vs. performance) goal, and when the recipient was more (vs. less) competent. Importantly, we found that this pattern matched adults’ actual task choices, although adults showed more sensitivity to choosing a task that anchors closely to what a child can reasonably learn from or accomplish. These results suggest children can reason about how adult’s achievement goals manifest into observable actions, which may have consequences for children’s own goal orientations and task selections.

19.02.2026 04:06 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Iconicity Gives Communicators a Head-Start, Even if Only the Producer Experiences It AbstractIconicity has increasingly come to be recognized as widespread in language. It plays a particularly important role in bootstrapping new referring expressions in existing languages and in the emergence of new languages and other communication systems. The basis of this role has long been assumed to depend primarily on transparency of the iconic signal for the receiver, who benefits from being better able to identify its meaning. But might there also be producer-side advantages, distinct from this transparency-based comprehension benefit, that support communication? We investigated this using an experimental referential communication game in which dyads used a novel signaling medium to communicate fruits and vegetables. We manipulated both whether the producer could generate iconic signals and whether the receiver saw iconic or arbitrary signals. Results suggested that there was an iconicity benefit via stability in production even if the receiver was unable to perceive the iconicity (and therefore unable to benefit from transparency). However, while this gave dyads a substantial head-start, the lack of a benefit from iconicity for the receiver meant dyads in this condition still performed significantly less well overall than dyads with full iconicity.

19.02.2026 04:06 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

A Resource-Rational Account of Human Eye Movements During Immersive Visual Search AbstractThe nature of eye movements during visual search has been widely studied in cognitive science. Virtual reality (VR) paradigms are an opportunity to test whether computational models of search can predict naturalistic search behavior. However, existing ideal observer models are constrained by strong assumptions about the structure of the world, rendering them impractical for modeling the complexity of environments which can be studied in VR. To address these limitations, we modeled immersive visual search as a reinforcement learning problem, in which sequential decisions are made over a multidimensional representation of the environment learned by a convolutional neural network. In our formulation, RL agents learned a policy over latent states—effectively solving what is known as a meta–Markov decision process (meta-MDP), where each decision concerns how to allocate attention to information in the environment. Training deep-RL agents on the meta-MDP showed that learned (i.e., optimal) search policies converge to a classic ideal-observer model of search developed for simple (1D) stimuli. We compared the learned resource-rational policy with human gaze data from a visual-search experiment conducted in VR and found qualitative and quantitative alignment between model predictions and human behavior. However, both the model’s simulated performance and its correspondence with human behavior depended strongly on the representational features available to the policy. These results suggest that naturalistic visual search behavior can partially be explained by resource-rational allocation of limited cognitive resources, and the choice of representation influences the degree of alignment between model and human behavior.

19.02.2026 04:06 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Are Choices Binary? There is a natural view of the relationship between preference and choice: an option is choiceworthy if and only if no alternative is strictly preferred to it. I argue against this view on two ground...

I have a new paper, "Are Choices Binary?", just up online at Philosophical Issues.

The paper argues that philosophical theory has gone wrong by focussing on binary relations like preference. (1/n)

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

17.02.2026 15:17 👍 12 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0

Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

18.02.2026 01:05 👍 142 🔁 45 💬 2 📌 0

When something doesn't work properly, can your dog tell if the object is broken or if you just don't know how to use it?

I'm pleased to share my group @jhu.edu's first study with pet dogs (!!), now out in @plosone.org

Led by Amalia Bastos: Do dog rationally infer the causes of failed actions? 1/4

16.02.2026 00:03 👍 47 🔁 15 💬 1 📌 1

Juan Murillo Vargas

Latest posts by Juan Murillo Vargas @jimurillo98