Deep neural networks perform astoundingly well on a whole range of difficult tasks. But what is going on inside? Are their computations anything like human reasoning? This paper shows that there are in fact two quite different ways that their internal processing works. This new distinction at the level of…

I’m very pleased to report that the Project’s interdisciplinary experimental work has now been published in Cognitive Science: Sapphira R. Thorne, Jake Quilty-Dunn, Joulia Smortchkova, Nicholas Shea*, & James A. Hampton (2021), ‘Concept Appraisal’, Cognitive Science, 45, e12978. [open access pdf] [link] In short, we find that people do reflect on or appraise…

Psychologists are making great strides forward in uncovering the mechanisms that support human metacognition. Especially when we also find out how those mechanisms work in the brain, we tend to assume that they are hard wired, a fixed part of our distinctively human endowment. However, capacities that we learn from…

One rich source of evidence for philosophers interested in concepts is the developmental literature. Indeed, some of the most theoretically sophisticated theorists of concepts are developmental psychologists. A natural extension of asking about the way adults turn their metacognitive capacities onto their own concepts is to ask how children’s metacognition…

One leading way to study consciousness empirically is through its links with metacognition. Indeed, some theories of consciousness equate them: conscious states just are metacognitively monitored states. The other leading scientific theory of consciousness is the global workspace theory. These two approaches are usually taken to be rivals. That is…