Abstract Prayer, a repeated practice of paying attention to one’s inner mental world, is a core behavior across many faiths and traditions, understudied by cognitive scientists. Previous research suggests that humans pray because prayer changes the way they feel or how they think. This paper makes a novel argument: that prayer changes what they feel […]

In a recent article in TiCS [1], Zeman provided a masterful and balanced review of aphantasia. However, in doing so, he might have been too generous to some accounts. Specifically, unlike Zeman, we consider the view that aphantasia involves nonconscious imagistic representations [2] to be clearly superior to other views. Here, we argue against these […]

How does social cognition help us communicate through language? At what levels does this interaction occur? In classical views, social cognition is independent of language, and integrating the two can be slow, effortful, and error-prone. But new research into word level processes reveals that communication is brimming with social micro-processes that happen in real time, […]