David Rosenthal’s higher order thought theory of consciousness (HOT) is one of the best articulated philosophical accounts of consciousness available. The theory is, roughly, that a mental state is conscious in virtue of there being another mental state, namely, a thought to the effect that one is in the first state. The second mental state is ‘‘higher order’’ since it is about a mental state. ...

The purpose of the present study was to determine the effect of metacognitive therapy (MCT) on symptoms of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and on symptoms of thought-fusion, by means of a wait-list controlled clinical trial. Participants were referred from dermatology and cosmetic surgery clinics in the city of Isfahan, Iran, and 20 patients were selected on the basis of DSM-IV-TR diagnostic cri...

Cognitive sciences such as developmental psychology, cognitive ethology and cognitive archaeology continuously produce evidence of high-level thinking in nonlinguistic creatures. José Luis Bermúdez applies this evidence in formulating a philosophical theory of non-linguistic thought, the main elements of which I summarise here. While I agree with most of the positive aspects of his theory of no...

Recent research has demonstrated that subjects fail to detect large between-view changes to natural and artificial scenes. Yet, most people (including psychologists) believe that they would detect the changes. We report two experiments documenting this metacognitive error. In Experiment 1, students in a large General Psychology class were asked if they thought they would notice the change in fo...