I'm Dillon Plunkett, a cognitive (neuro)scientist studying complex thought.
Research
I'm interested in complex thought, conscious awareness, and the relationship between the two. What kinds of thoughts are we capable of thinking and how does the brain encode them? Which mental processes do we consciously experience and what determines the character of those experiences?
I'm also interested in artificial intelligence systems, both intellectually and because they will likely be either enormously beneficial or catastrophically harmful for life on Earth. Accordingly, my research is increasingly focused on understanding and steering powerful AI systems.
Currently, I work with Jorge Morales in the Subjectivity Lab. Previously, I did my PhD research in Joshua Greene's lab at Harvard. Before that, I did research in experimental epistemology, causal inference, and metareasoning with Tania Lombrozo and Tom Griffiths while working in the Concepts and Cognition and Computational Cognitive Science labs at UC Berkeley.
As an undergraduate, I studied philosophy and psychology at Harvard. My thesis work focused on another topic I find fascinating: the rational and moral significance of personal identity. Precisely what makes some future person me and why should I care more about that person than other people?
Publications
Full CV (pdf)
- Plunkett, D., Morris, A., Reddy, K., & Morales, J. (in prep; accepted to ASSC 2025). Large language models can accurately explain their internal processes, and this ability can be improved with training.
- Plunkett, D. & Morales, J. (in revision). Representational momentum transcends motion.
- Plunkett, D. & Greene, J. D. (in prep). Evidence for crossmodal translation of complex ideas in left lateral posterior temporal cortex.
- Plunkett, D., Frankland, S. M., & Greene, J. D. (in revision). Neural representation of compositional ideas with spatial structure.
- Bernhard, R. M., Frankland, S. M., Plunkett, D., Sievers, B., & Greene, J. D. (2023). Evidence for Spinozan “unbelieving” in the right inferior prefrontal cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01964
- Plunkett, D. & Greene, J. D. (2019). Overlooked evidence and a misunderstanding of what trolley dilemmas do best: Commentary on Bostyn, Sevenhant, & Roets (2018). Psychological Science, 30, 1389-1391. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619827914
- Plunkett, D., Lombrozo, T., & Buchak, L. (2019). When and why people think beliefs are “debunked” by scientific explanations of their origins. Mind & Language, 35, 3-28. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12238
- Wilkenfeld, D. A., Plunkett, D., & Lombrozo, T. (2018). Folk attributions of understanding: Is there a role for epistemic luck? Episteme, 15, 24-49. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2016.38
- Wilkenfeld, D. A., Plunkett, D., & Lombrozo, T. (2016). Depth and deference: When and why we attribute understanding. Philosophical Studies, 173, 373-393. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0497-y
- Buchsbaum, D., Griffiths, T. L., Plunkett, D., Gopnik, A., & Baldwin, D. (2015). Inferring action structure and causal relationships in continuous sequences of human action. Cognitive Psychology, 76, 30-77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2014.10.001
- Lieder, F., Plunkett, D., Hamrick, J. B., Russell, S. J., Hay, N. J., & Griffiths, T. L. (2014). Algorithm selection by rational metareasoning as a model of human strategy selection. In Z. Ghahramani, M. Welling, C. Cortes, N. Lawrence, & K. Weinberger (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27 (pp. 2870-2878). Red Hook, NY: Curran Associates, Inc.