Gary Lupyan
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Gary Lupyan is Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he directs the Lupyan Lab investigating how language modulates perception, categorization, and internal mental representations.
Lupyan developed the label-feedback hypothesis, arguing that verbal labels act as top-down predictive cues that warp low-level perceptual feature spaces in real time. In 2024, collaborating with Johanne S. K. Nedergaard in Psychological Science (Not Everybody Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia), Lupyan investigated what happens when that internal verbal loop is absent in neurotypical adults. Their experiments showed that individuals with anendophasia lack automatic phonological rehearsal in working memory and visual rhyme tasks, yet retain intact general intelligence, perceptual awareness, and executive task switching.
In the context of artificial and biological consciousness, Lupyan’s work clarifies the architectural role of language in a Global Workspace. Verbal tokens provide a high-compression broadcast code that sharpens category boundaries and stabilizes working memory, while phenomenal perception and goal-directed control operate in parallel non-verbal state spaces.
Known for. Label-feedback hypothesis, language-augmented cognition, coining anendophasia with Johanne Nedergaard (2024)
Coverage on this site
- Anendophasia and Memory Reconsolidation in Nedergaard, Lupyan and Nader's Cognitive Studies November 2026
Related researchers
- Johanne S. K. NedergaardDepartment of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of CopenhagenCoining anendophasia (with Gary Lupyan) and measuring the behavioral consequences of lacking an inner voice
- Karim NaderDepartment of Psychology, McGill UniversityDiscovery of memory reconsolidation in the amygdala (Nature 2000 with Glenn Schafe and Joseph LeDoux), labile trace updating upon conscious recall
- Hedayat AbedijooACE Conscious Studio / IndependentACE.await (2026), the ACE decision framework (Agency, Connection, Exchange)
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Blaise Agüera y ArcasGoogle VP and Fellow, CTO of Technology & SocietyComputational functionalism, active inference, on-device neural computing, What Is Intelligence? (2025), and Who Are We Now? (2023)
- Igor AleksanderImperial College LondonAxiomatic Consciousness Theory, neural state machines, The World in My Mind, pioneering neural network engineering
- Micah AllenCenter of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University and University of CambridgeInteroceptive predictive processing, Embodied Dynamic Causal Modelling, visceral modulation of perceptual awareness and metacognition
Gary Lupyan is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.