Bringing together 20 foundational texts in contemporary modernist criticism in one accessible volume, this book explores the debates that have transformed the field of modernist studies at the turn of the millennium and into the 21st century. The New Modernist Studies Reader features chapters covering the major topics central to the study of modernism today, including: Feminism, gender and sexuality; Empire and race; Print and media cultures; Historical and geographical debates. Each text includes an introductory summary of its historical and (...) intellectual contexts, as well as guides to further reading to help students and teachers explore the ideas further. Includes essential texts by leading critics such as: Pascale Casanova, Anne Anlin Cheng, Brent Hayes Edwards, Rita Felski, Susan Stanford Friedman, Mark Goble, Miriam Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, David James, Fredric Jameson, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Mark S. Morrisson, Michael North, Jessica Pressman, Lawrence Rainey, Paul K. Saint-Amour, Bonnie Kime Scott, Urmila Seshagiri, Robert Spoo, and Rebecca Walkowitz. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts denying that temporal passage is an objective feature of reality face an explanatory challenge with respect to why it appears to us as though time passes. Recently, two solutions have surfaced. Cognitive illusionism claims that people experience the passage of time due to their belief that time passes. Cognitive error theory claims that we do not experience the passage of time, but hold the belief that we do, which we have acquired through making an inference from the prior (...) belief that time passes. These approaches suppose that belief and passage experience are explanatorily connected, and they depend on the claims that people who experience the passage of time or at least believe that they do also believe that time passes. To test these claims, we probed the beliefs of populations of individuals with depression and schizotypy, thus conditions that are strongly associated with alterations in temporal phenomenology. Depression was assessed with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and schizotypy with the short Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE). While cognitive illusionism and inferentialist cognitive error theory would predict a strong association between BDI and O-LIFE scores and beliefs about time passage, our study found no such association. The experience of passage does not seem to be explanatorily connected to beliefs about the passage of time. (shrink)

Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to (...) which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Deflationists hold that it does not seem to us, in experience, as though time robustly passes. There is some recent empirical evidence that appears to support this contention. Equally, empirical evidence suggests that we naïvely represent time as dynamical. Thus deflationists are faced with an explanatory burden. If, as they maintain, the world seems to us in experience as though it is non-dynamical, then why do we represent time as dynamical? This paper takes up the challenge of investigating, on the (...) part of the deflationist, one candidate explanation. We hypothesise that people’s belief that the future is what we call deliberatively open partly explains why they represent time as dynamical. In a series of two experiments we test this hypothesis. We find no evidence that beliefs about deliberative openness explain why people represent time as dynamical. Hence there remains an explanatory burden for the deflationist to discharge. (shrink)

It has widely been assumed, by philosophers, that most people unambiguously have a phenomenology as of time passing, and that this is a datum that philosophical theories must accommodate. Moreover, it has been assumed that the greater the extent to which people have said phenomenology, the more likely they are to endorse a dynamical theory of time. This paper is the first to empirically test these assumptions. Surprisingly, our results do not support either assumption. One experiment instead found the reverse (...) correlation: people were more likely to report having passage phenomenology if they endorsed a non-dynamical theory of time. Given that people do not have an unambiguous phenomenology as of time passing, we conclude that this is suggestive evidence in favor of veridical non-dynamism—the view that our phenomenology is veridical, and that it does not unambiguously represent that time passes. Instead, our phenomenology veridically has some quite different content. (shrink)

People are ‘biased toward the future’: all else being equal, we typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. Several explanations have been suggested for this pattern of preferences. Adjudicating among these explanations can, among other things, shed light on the rationality of future-bias: For instance, if our preferences are explained by unjustified beliefs or an illusory phenomenology, we might conclude that they are irrational. This paper investigates one hypothesis, according to which future-bias (...) is explained by our having a phenomenology that we describe, or conceive of, as being as of time robustly passing. We empirically tested this hypothesis and found no evidence in its favour. Our results present a puzzle, however, when compared with the results of an earlier study. We conclude that although robust passage phenomenology on its own probably does not explain future-bias, having this phenomenology and taking it to be veridical may contribute to future-bias. (shrink)

We share Nair-Collins and Joffe's (2023) concern with the accuracy of the “whole brain-death” diagnosis, which fails to take into account current understandings of residual brain function (neurohor...

Many philosophers hold that ‘one-instant worlds’—worlds that contain a single instant—fail to contain time. We experimentally investigate whether these worlds satisfy the folk concept of time. We found that ~50% of participants hold that there is time in such worlds. We argue that this suggests one of two possibilities. First, the population disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, with there being a substantial sub-population for whom the presence of neither an (...) A-, B-, nor C-series, is necessary for time, and hence those folk have a radically more minimal concept of time than has been attributed to them by philosophers. Or, second, the population do not disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, but disagree about what it takes for a world to fail to contain even a C-series. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates the contention that the folk concept of time is a functional concept: a concept according to which time is whatever plays a certain functional role or roles. This hypothesis could explain why, in previous research, surprisingly large percentages of participants judge that there is time at worlds that contain no one-dimensional substructure of ordered instants. If it seems to participants that even in those worlds the relevant functional role is played, then this could explain why they (...) judge that there is time in those worlds. While our experiment supported the finding that participants are reticent to judge that there is no time, actually, we found no evidence that this is because they deploy a functionalist concept, at least of the kind proposed in recent research. Our findings are, however, consistent with the folk deploying a much more minimal functionalist concept according to which time is just whatever it is—regardless of its nature—that plays the role of grounding our temporal phenomenology. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that a majority of people believe that time robustly passes, and that many also report that it seems to them, in experience, as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists deny that time robustly passes, and many contemporary non-dynamists—deflationists—even deny that it seems to us as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists, then, face the dual challenge of explaining why people have such beliefs and make such reports about their experiences. Several philosophers have suggested the stable-self explanation, according to which (...) what partly explains one or both of the explananda is that people believe themselves to have a stable persisting self which is imagined either as moving through time, or as being stationary, with time moving around it. This paper empirically investigates this explanation. We found, however, no evidential support for the stable-self explanation, leaving the non-dynamist but also, we will argue, the dynamist, with an extant explanatory challenge. (shrink)

One debate surrounding Derk Pereboom’s (2001, 2014) four-case argument against compatibilism focuses on whether, and why, we judge manipulated agents to be neither free nor morally responsible. In this paper, we propose a novel explanation. The four-case argument features cases where an agent is the only individual in her universe who has been manipulated. Let us call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents existential manipulation. Contrast this with universal manipulation, which affects all agents within a (...) universe. We propose that we find agents in Pereboom’s manipulation cases less free and morally responsible in part because they are the target of existential manipulation. We empirically tested this hypothesis and found that people’s free will and moral responsibility judgments were sensitive to the scope of manipulation: people judged existentially manipulated agents significantly less free and responsible than universally manipulated agents. (shrink)

This paper argues for a view of free will that I will call the conceptual impossibility of the truth of free will error theory - the conceptual impossibility thesis. I will argue that given the concept of free will we in fact deploy, it is impossible for our free will judgements - judgements regarding whether some action is free or not - to be systematically false. Since we do judge many of our actions to be free, it follows from the (...) conceptual impossibility thesis that many of our actions are in fact free. Hence it follows that free will error theory - the view that no judgement of the form ‘action A was performed freely’ - is false. I will show taking seriously the conceptual impossibility thesis helps makes good sense of some seemingly inconsistent results in recent experimental philosophy work on determinism and our concept of free will. Further, I will present some reasons why we should expect to find similar results for every other factor we might have thought was important for free will. (shrink)

The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it is misleading, as it is (...) founded in erroneous intensional misreadings of the logical positivists’—especially Carnap’s—extensional notions of translation and meaning, as well as misinterpretations of the positivists’ shift from the strong thesis of translation-physicalism to the weaker and more liberal notion of reduction-physicalism that occurred in the Unity of Science programme. After setting the historical record straight, the essay traces the first truly modern identity theory to Schlick’s pre-positivist views circa 1920 and goes on to explore its further development in Feigl, arguing that the fundamental difference between the Schlick-Feigl identity theory and the more familiar and influential Place-Smart-Armstrong identity theory has resurfaced in the deep and seemingly unbridgeable gulf in contemporary philosophy of consciousness between inflationary mentalism and deflationary physicalism. (shrink)

In this thesis, I will defend a new kind of compatibilist account of free action, indirect conscious control compatibilism (or indirect compatibilism for short), and argue that some of our actions are free according to it. My argument has three components, and involves the development of a brand new tool for experimental philosophy, and the use of cognitive neuroscience. The first component of the argument shows that compatibilism (of some kind) is a conceptual truth. Contrary to the current orthodoxy in (...) the free will literature, which is that our concept of free will is an incompatibilist concept - a concept according to which we have free will only if determinism is false - I will show that our concept of free will is in fact a compatibilist concept - a concept according to which we can have free will even if determinism is true - and I do so using a new experimental philosophy methodology inspired by two-dimensional semantics. -/- Of course, even if our concept of free will is a compatibilist concept, this does not mean that there are any free actions in the world: the current empirical evidence from the brain sciences appears to show that there might be no, or very few, free actions in the world, even on many compatibilist understandings of what it would take for there to be free will. The second component of the argument addresses this concern by extending our understanding of compatibilism. Agents act freely either when their actions are caused by compatibilistically acceptable psychological processes, or are indirectly caused by those same processes. Hence the name of my account: indirect compatibilism. -/- The final component of the argument defends my new account against some interesting objections and provides evidence from cognitive neuroscience that some of our actions count as free by the lights of indirect compatibilism. (shrink)

Forty years have passed since video-games were first made widely available to the public and subsequently playing games has become a favorite past-time for many. Players continuously engage with dynamic visual displays with success contingent on the time-pressured deployment, and flexible allocation, of attention as well as precise bimanual movements. Evidence to date suggests that both brief and extensive exposure to video-game play can result in a broad range of enhancements to various cognitive faculties that generalize beyond the original context. (...) Despite promise, video-game research is host to a number of methodological issues that require addressing before progress can be made in this area. Here an effort is made to consolidate the past 30 years of literature examining the effects of video-game play on cognitive faculties and, more recently, neural systems. Future work is required to identify the mechanism that allows the act of video-game play to generate such a broad range of generalized enhancements. (shrink)

Gender dysphoria is a persistent distress about one’s assigned gender. Referrals regarding gender dysphoria have recently greatly increased, often of a form that is rapid in onset. The sex ratio ha...

This paper seeks to analyse an under-discussed kind of self-control, namely the control of thoughts and sensations. I distinguish first-order control from second-order control and argue that their central forms are intentional concentration and intentional mindfulness respectively. These correspond to two forms of meditation, concentration meditation and mindfulness meditation, which have been regarded as central both in the traditions in which the practices arose and in the scientific literature on meditation. I analyse them in terms of their characteristic intentions, distinguish (...) them from concentration and mindfulness in general, and examine the relations between them. Concentration involves keeping the mind focused on a single object, while mindfulness requires noticing whatever mental states occupy the focus of one’s consciousness. In the course of the investigation I examine the role of phenomenology and volition in the activity of meditating, and how they change as meditative capacities develop. (shrink)

Public reason liberals claim that legitimate rules must be justifiable to diverse perspectives. This Public Justification Principle threatens that failing to justify rules to reprehensible agents makes those rules illegitimate. Although public reason liberals have replies to this objection, they cannot avoid the challenge of powerful deceivers. Powerful deceivers trick people who are purportedly owed public justification into considering otherwise good rules to be unjustified. Avoiding this challenge requires discounting some failures of justification, according to what caused people’s beliefs. I (...) offer a conception of public justification that accommodates these externalist considerations while positioning Public Reason Liberalism to provide insight into real cases of deception. (shrink)

This article offers some general criticisms of the idea that any political theory can legitimate public health interventions, and then some particular criticisms of Civic Republicanism as a political theory for public health. Civic Republicanism, I argue, legitimizes liberty-infringing public health interventions by demanding high levels of civic engagement in framing and reviewing them; to demand such engagement in pursuit of such a baseline value as health will leave insufficient civic energy for the pursuit of higher values.

What it would take to vindicate folk temporal error theory? This question is significant against a backdrop of new views in quantum gravity—so-called timeless physical theories—that claim to eliminate time by eliminating a one-dimensional substructure of ordered temporal instants. Ought we to conclude that if these views are correct, nothing satisfies the folk concept of time and hence that folk temporal error theory is true? In light of evidence we gathered, we argue that physical theories that entirely eliminate an ordered (...) substructure vindicate folk temporal error theory. (shrink)

The Public Justification Principle requires that coercive institutions be justified to all who live under them. I argue that this principle often cannot be satisfied without persons depending on the pure informative testimony of others, even under realistically idealized situations. Two main results follow. First, the sense of justification relevant to this principle has a strongly externalist component. Second, normative expectations of trust are essential to public justification. On the view I propose, whether the Public Justification Principle is satisfied depends (...) on the features of the network of testifiers in which persons are embedded. I consider several such networks to show which features are plausibly relevant. The importance of testimony for public justification ultimately suggests that we should moderate our expectations about the kind of conciliation we can achieve with the social order in which we live. (shrink)

We agree with Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland’s (2023) assessment that the Dead Donor Rule (DDR) should be viewed as an essential requirement of the organ donation process, and that the essence of the r...

Prominent defenders of the Enlightenment, like Jürgen Habermas, are beginning to recognize that the characterization of human beings in entirely rational and secular terms leaves out something important. Religion, they admit, plays an important role in human existence. But the return to a traditional monotheistic religion seems sociologically difficult after the death of God. We argue that Homeric polytheism retains a phenomenologically rich account of the sacred, and a similarly rich understanding of human existence in its midst. By opening ourselves (...) up to the moods of wonder and gratitude at the root of Homer's sense of the sacred, we can re-appropriate a polytheistic understanding of the sacred that allows us to recover and revive the intensity and meaningfulness that Homer's polytheists enjoyed. (shrink)

The received view in the history of the philosophy of psychology is that the logical positivists—Carnap and Hempel in particular—endorsed the position commonly known as “logical” or “analytical” behaviourism, according to which the relations between psychological statements and the physical-behavioural statements intended to give their meaning are analytic and knowable a priori. This chapter argues that this is sheer legend: most, if not all, such relations were viewed by the logical positivists as synthetic and knowable only a posteriori. It then (...) traces the origins of the legend to the logical positivists’ idiosyncratic extensional or at best weakly intensional use of what are now considered crucially strongly intensional semantic notions, such as “translation,” “meaning” and their cognates, focussing on a particular instance of this latter phenomenon, arguing that a conflation of explicit definition and analyticity may be the chief source of the legend. (shrink)

Gruber and Smith (2019) have conducted some interesting virtual reality (VR) experiments, but we think that these experiments fail to illuminate why people think that the present is special. Their experiments attempted to test a suggestion by Hartle (2005) that with VR one might construct scenarios in which people experience the same present twice. If that’s possible, then it could give us a reason to think that when we experience the present as being special, that’s not because it’s objectively so. (...) Instead, our experience of the present being special is a feature of having a psychology like ours. While we are sympathetic to the thought that there is no objective present, we do not think that these experiments give us a reason to think this. That said, VR experiments, such as Gruber and Smith’s, hold much promise for being able to illuminate various aspects of our temporal psychology.According to Hartle’s (2005) IGUS model (which is meant to resemble entities like us) sensory information is routed to two kinds of processes: conscious processes C, which cause behavior, and unconscious processes, U, which construct a schematic representation of the environment. Hartle proposed that we experience the present as being special because of the sensory information at a time entering into C. For Gruber et al. (2020), the succession of sensory information entering into C underpins our experience of time passing. Our experience of time passing is illusory because it fails to be verid... (shrink)

Many philosophers have become sceptical of the use of thought experiments in theorising about personal identity. In large part this is due to work in experimental philosophy that appears to confirm long held philosophical suspicions that thought experiments elicit inconsistent judgements about personal identity, and hence judgements that are thought to be the product of cognitive biases. If so, these judgements appear to be useless at informing our theories of personal identity. Using the methods of experimental philosophy, we investigate whether (...) people exhibit inconsistent judgements and, if they do, whether these judgements are likely to be the source of cognitive bias or, instead, sensitivity to some relevant factor. We do not find that people’s judgements are sensitive to any of the factors we investigate (relevant or irrelevant), nor that people have inconsistent judgements across cases. Rather, people’s judgements are best explained by them having a very minimal account of what it takes for a person to survive. Since this pattern of judgements is no reason to think that we are subject to cognitive bias, we see no reason, as things stand, to be sceptical of our judgements. (shrink)

This paper investigates two assumptions of the exponential discounted utility theory (EDU) to which Callender draws our attention: namely that we can cleanly distinguish pure from impure temporal preferences, and that past discounting can be ignored. Drawing on recent empirical work in this area, we argue that in so far as one might have thought that past-directed preferences are more pure than future ones, then there is evidence that people’s pure preferences (in so far as we can make sense of (...) that notion) show more interpersonal variation than has previously been thought. (shrink)

The distinction between token and type physicalism is a familiar feature of discussion of psychophysical relations. Token physicalism, or ontological physicalism, is the view that every token, or particular, in the spatiotemporal world is a physical particular. It is contrasted with type physicalism, or property physicalism -- the view that every first-order type, or property, instantiated in the spatiotemporal world is a physical property. Token physicalism is commonly viewed as a clear thesis, strictly weaker than property physicalism, strictly stronger than (...) substance physicalism, and as a good statement on its own or in conjunction with other theses of minimal physicalism.[i] It is also generally simply assumed to be true, though Davidson has offered a famous argument for its truth, and some have argued against it. Many of those arguing against it are substance physicalists, indicating that they believe token physicalism to be a strictly stronger view.[ii]. (shrink)

There is considerable philosophical dispute about what it takes for an action to be evil. The methodological assumption underlying this dispute is that there is a single, shared folk conception of evil action deployed amongst culturally similar people. Empirical research we undertook suggests that this assumption is false. There exist, amongst the folk, numerous conceptions of evil action. Hence, we argue, philosophical research is most profitably spent in two endeavours. First, in determining which (if any) conception of evil action we (...) have prudential or moral (or both) reason to deploy, and second, in determining whether we could feasibly come to adopt that conception as the single shared conception given our psychological make-up and the content of the conceptions currently deployed. (shrink)

This article traces the multiple enactments of sex in clinical practices of transgender medicine to argue against the presumed singularity of ‘transexuality’. Using autoethnography to analyse my own experience as a trans patient, I describe my clinical encounters with doctors, psychiatrists and surgeons in order to theorise sex as multiple. Following recent developments in science and technology studies (STS) that advance the work of Judith Butler on sex as performatively reproduced, I use a praxiographic approach to argue that treatment practices (...) produce particular iterations of what sex (and transexuality) ‘is’ and how these processes limit and foreclose other trans possibilities. I consider the ethical, political and material-discursive implications of treatment practices and offer a series of reflections about the effects and effectiveness of current clinical practices and the possibilities for intervening in such processes in order that, following Annemarie Mol, we might (re)make sex (and transexuality) differently. (shrink)

Every country's law permits medical experimentation on animals. While some countries protect particular kinds of animals from being subject to experimentation—notably great apes and endangered species—very few place concrete limitations on what researchers may cause animals to suffer, given sufficient scientific justification. What laws do, instead, is establish standards for the humane treatment and housing of animals in labs, and they encourage researchers to limit or seek alternatives to the use of animals, when doing that is consistent with the scientific (...) goals of their research.The system that has evolved in the United States combines elements of sometimes competing regulatory philosophies. The result is a complex, multilayered system that addresses the most important concerns, but, partly because of historical accident, also leaves some gaps. Even proponents of medical research on animals can see obvious ways in which the regulatory structure could be changed to benefit animals. Perhaps more important, though, is the fact that the existing regulatory structure, imperfect though it may be, is elastic enough to accommodate substantial changes that could reduce unnecessary animal suffering. (shrink)

Collective procedural memory is a group’s memory of how to do things, as opposed to a group’s memory of facts. It enables groups to mount effective responses to periodic events (e.g., natural hazards) and to sustain collective projects (e.g., combatting climate change). This article presents an account of collective procedural memory called the Ability Conception. The Ability Conception has various advantages over other accounts of collective procedural memory, such as those appealing to collective know-how and collective identity. It also demonstrates (...) new applications for collective procedural memory. I develop three in this article: to social epistemology, to the ethics of memorialization, and to a pattern of group vulnerability to recurring hazardous events that I call the saeculum effect. (shrink)

In a recent issue of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Emily Carroll and Parker Crutchfield published a paper entitled, “The Duty to Protect, Abortion, and Organ Donation.” They argued that a prohibition on abortion is morally equivalent to a positive mandate for parents to donate organs to their children and that opponents of abortion must be prepared to accept these mandates to remain consistent.

The question of ontological commitment in Plato’s Hippias Major has been important in disputes over the dialogue’s place in the corpus, its meaning, and its authenticity. But this question seems to have been settled—the Hippias Major is not committed to the ‘forms.’ Such an ontological conclusion has been vigorously defended, but its defenses rest on a problematic meta-ontological framework. This paper suggests a more adequate framework and brings more evidence to the evaluation of the question of ontological commitment in the (...) Hippias Major. It concludes that the dialogue is indeed committed to some kind of form. (shrink)

Two epistemic principles are Knowledge Exclusion and Belief Exclusion. Knowledge Exclusion says that it is necessarily the case that if an agent knows that p, then she does not believe that ∼p, and Belief Exclusion says that it is necessarily the case that if an agent believes that q, then she does not believe that ∼q. Many epistemologists find it reasonable to reject the latter principle and accept the former. I argue that this is in fact not reasonable by proposing (...) a case in which an agent can use that she has contradictory beliefs towards a proposition as decisive evidence for that proposition. A natural response is that this case conflicts with common assumptions about the relation between knowledge, contradictory beliefs and rationality. I reply by drawing ideas from Lasonen-Aarnio’s remarks on unreasonable knowledge to explain why these common assumptions do not threaten my argument. (shrink)

Twenty-two experienced action video-game players (AVGPs) and 18 non-VGPs were tested on a pen-and-paper line bisection task that was untimed. Typically, right-handers bisect lines 2 % to the left of true centre, a bias thought to reflect the dominance of the right-hemisphere for visuospatial attention. Expertise may affect this bias, with expert musicians showing no bias in line bisection performance. Our results show that experienced-AVGPs also bisect lines with no bias with their right hand and a significantly reduced bias with (...) their left hand compared to non-AVGPs. Bisections by experienced-AVGPs were also more precise than those of non-AVGPs. These findings show the cognitive proficiencies of experienced-AVGPs can generalize beyond computer based tasks, which resemble their training environment. (shrink)

Both short and long-term video-game play may result in superior performance on visual and attentional tasks. To further these findings, we compared the performance of experienced male video-game players (VGPs) and non-VGPs on a Simon-task. Experienced-VGPs began playing before the age of 10, had a minimum of 8 years of experience and a minimum play time of over 20 h per week over the past 6 months. Our results reveal a significantly reduced Simon-effect in experienced-VGPs relative to non-VGPs. However, this (...) was true only for the right-responses, which typically show a greater Simon-effect than left-responses. In addition, experienced-VGPs demonstrated significantly quicker reaction times and more balanced left-versus-right-hand performance than non-VGPs. Our results suggest that experienced-VGPs can resolve response-selection conflicts more rapidly for right-responses than non-VGPs, and this may in part be underpinned by improved bimanual motor control. (shrink)