You press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe

Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social

Your dominant hand isn't better because it's "born" that way. It's just had more practice, a new PNAS study finds. The skill gap appears only when you pick up a tool, suggesting handedness is, in part, a fingerprint of human tool-use culture.

i argue that there is an *enormous* gap in justification between our first-personal beliefs of consciousness in ourselves and our third-personal, theoretical belief of what consciousness is according to contemporary consciousness science.

new paper coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: How Seriously Should We Take AI Welfare? Constraints from the Epistemology of Consciousness philpapers.org/rec/LENHSS

Had so much fun at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology last week! First talk of my life and it was an amazing experience! @socphilpsych.bsky.social #SPP2026

Lovely to see the full range of excellent commentaries on our BBS article with @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, together with our response, now out: Target article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Commentaries: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Our response: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

looking forward to reading the hell out of this paper!

anyway fun 8 years later coda to this story: i won the poster prize this year lol

Just came across this remarkable interview with Marjorie Grene at age 94: www.thebeliever.net/an-interview... Two of my favourite bits, when Grene is asked about Rorty and about Lakatos: Rorty is just witty, but doesn't have a philosophy and Grene is quick to say that she did not kill Lakatos!

Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe (@levelsof.bsky.social), on winning the Society for Philosophy and Psychology’s 2026 Stanton Prize and, more generally, for your rich research program demonstrating the origins of abstract, generative thought in human infants.

from @matthiasmichel.bsky.social - important antidote to the "LLMs are conscious" hype

Millions Of New Yorkers Show Up To Celebrate Plucky Underdog James Dolan

A new paper, forthcoming in PPR: Visual Icons This paper took me more than 5 years to write. It argues that the visual system constructs imagistic representations ("visual icons") and sketches a theory of how visual icons, and iconic representations generally, are compositionally structured.

me watching the fourth quarter of that game last night

spurs in 6

I wrote a piece for the Yale Review on AI and "jagged intelligence". (Note: headline was not written by me.) yalereview.org/article/mela...

New preprint: Random network structure stabilizes neural manifolds We’re excited to share our new work on representational drift. doi.org/10.64898/202... Representational drift poses a puzzle. 👇 A short thread below. In the next days a figure by figure walk through will follow. 1/5 🧪🧠

Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

it was a real joy going to VSS this year. vision science must be protected at all costs

All the philosophy students who pursued their passion made a wise decision. Learning how to think is a always a good investment. Psychology grads are not doing too badly on the job market either.

more of this!

🔥🔥🔥

Thrilled this is out! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 🧵 Do we have 2 kinds of beliefs? Some beliefs seem insensitive to evidence and rarely guide behavior, etc. To explain this, several theories divide belief into 2 types. I argue the explanation isn't in the *mind* but in the *world*

wrote a thing—it's fun you should read it

I think it's important for neuroscientists to reinforce this too. It's the first thing I teach in my cog neuro class. A thing isn't more real just because it's found in the brain. Every psychological thing must be in the brain at some level

Hey psychologists, when you're explaining some psychological phenomenon that's perfectly well captured in psychological terms, maybe you don't need to refer to some shitty neuroimaging study with ten people to make it seem more "sciencey"...

philosophy: i'm going to use this word. others use that word. these words are different but also similar. i use this one because i want to talk about this thing. other people interested in that thing use the other word. however, what i say will also matter for that word even though i use this word.

In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis. Paywall bypass: archive.is/6RdK9

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

interesting paper on what makes a psychological event count as learning by henry schiller, who is not on bluesky. highly recommend it philpapers.org/rec/SCHRLP-4

If AI was basically popular and useful but we couldn't monetize it, that'd be one thing. If we all loved the games and community and connections, great. That's not really the issue. It's not broadly useful, it's costly and environmentally damaging, and it destroys jobs without replacing them.

the sinking feeling when you see someone has cited your worst paper

New paper out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: we apply linguistic tools to sperm whale vowels. The result: sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them. We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels.

We'd love to involve the broader VSS community in this event, starting now. We genuinely want to know where you stand on this topic, so please feel free to give us your open-ended hot takes here (the spiciest takes may be featured in the intro): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

🧵Excited to announce— "Reimagining the binding problem(s) for the 21st century": A VSS Symposium St. Pete Beach @vssmtg.bsky.social May 15th, 10:30am Presenters: Peter Tse, JohnMark Taylor, Seda Karakose-Akbiyik, Ana Chica, Anne Sereno, & Jake Quilty-Dunn visionsciences.org/symposia/?sy...

happy #CDS2026 to those who celebrate!

i mean if i don't repost this asinine thing i made now, when will i

this fall i'm teaching intro to philosophy for the first time in over ten years. please, i am begging: share your syllabi! the weirder the better!

The next round of Zed and my work on aesthetic judgment and conversation: inspired by Susan Sontag we make the case for "seriousness" in aesthetic judgment and against vibing, communitarianism and the "omnivore monoculture". onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New article! Many folks love their AI companions, and some philosophers argue current systems should count as "friends" functionally: they reciprocate "care" through positive intentions and rewarding experiences. 1/ philpapers.org/rec/BROAAT-37

it's bullshit when connections has ad-hoc barsalou-ass categories

We need to bring back the ideal of masculinity focused on quiet self-sacrifice for the sake of others. Alpha shit is for losers. Be a man and humbly forgo the shit you want for years so you can provide for your family, you indulgent little wuss

New commentary on Bai et al.'s BBS target article, co-authored with E. J. Green. Bai et al. argue that core cognition should be reconceptualized as perceptual. We argue that principles of object continuity in visual perception do not match traditional principles of core object cognition.

Perfect

glib, evidence-avoidant critiques of dissonance theory exemplify the central claims of the theory