I’m an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Previously, I got a DPhil from the University of Oxford, held a MindCORE Research Fellowship at Penn, a VISTA Research Fellowship at York, and froze my studies in Oxford to take up a Procter Fellowship at Princeton (a position held by Alan Turing 80 years earlier!!). I’m also the treasurer for the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

Broadly speaking, I work at the intersection between philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I’m particularly interested in psychological capacities that emerge independently of natural language (e.g., the number sense), psychological processes that don’t depend on linguistically structured representations (e.g., processes that employ analogue or iconic representations), and various issues to do with cognitive architecture. 

Published & Forthcoming Papers

(2024) ‘Number Adaptation: A Critical Look’ (w/ Sami Yousif & Liz Brannon) in Cognition [pdf]

• This paper will be published with a back and forth between us and some of the folks we disagree with – I’ll post links to these replies as soon as they’re available.
• See here for demos of the experiments [link]
• While we’re skeptical, we’ve compiled a list of all reported cases of number adaptation – perhaps helpful to other people working on this topic [link]
• Our work on this topic also appears as a (2023) VSS abstract, titled ‘Strong evidence against number adaptation’ in Journal of Vision [link]

(2023) ‘Compositionality and Constituent Structure in the Analogue Mind’ in Philosophical Perspectives (annual supplement to Noûs) [pdf]

(2023) ‘Border Disputes: Recent Debates along the Perception–Cognition Border’ (w/ Jacob Beck) in Philosophy Compass [pdf] 

• See also: (2023) ‘Teaching & Learning Guide to Border Disputes: Recent Debates along the Perception–Cognition Border‘ (w/ Jacob Beck) in Philosophy Compass [pdf]

(2023) ‘Do Humans Visually Adapt to Number, or Just Itemhood?’ (w/ Sami Yousif and Elizabeth Brannon) in The Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society [pdf]

(2023) ‘Babies Are Born with an Innate Number Sense’ (w/ Jacob Beck) in Scientific American [link]

• This ↑ explains some of our philosophical work on the number sense to a general audience [appears as an 8page feature article, titled ‘Born to Count’, in the March ’23 print issue of Scientific American]
• Reprinted in the Spring ’23 special issue of Scientific American on ‘The Brain’
• Three letters of response and our reply to these appear in the September ’23 print issue of Scientific American
• A German translation of our article is due to appear in Gehirn&Geist magazine and a French translation appears here

(2023) ‘Is Pain Modular?’ (w/ Laurenz Casser) in Mind & Language [pdf]

(2022) ‘Mapping the Visual Icon’ in The Philosophical Quarterly [pdf]

• This ↑ is related to a blogpost I wrote for The Junkyard

(2022) ‘Beyond the Icon: Core cognition and the bounds of perception’ in Mind & Language [pdf]

• This ↑ was accepted ages ago (2019), and I’ve since changed my mind about some bits. But the general suggestion that analogue reps need not satisfy the parts principle still seems right to me

(2021) ‘Numbers, Numerosities, and New Directions’ (w/ Jacob Beck) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences [pdf]

• This ↑ responds to the 26 commentaries our target article received

(2021) ‘The Number Sense Represents (Rational) Numbers’ (w/ Jacob Beck) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences [pdf] 

• This ↑ is a target article, published with 26 commentaries and our response to these
• For an accessible write-up in Y-File see here.
• For discussion/interview on Swiss National Radio [mostly in German] see here.
• For discussion/interview in Die Zeit [in German] see here/here.

(2021) ‘Cognitive Penetration and Informational Encapsulation: Have we been failing the module?’ in Philosophical Studies [pdf]

• An earlier draft of this ↑ won the 2019 CSPE Bursary as the top ranked submission on mind/perception to the University of Glasgow’s annual GEM (epistemology and mind) conference 

(2020) ‘Does the Number Sense Represent Number?’ (w/ Jacob Beck) in The Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society 

(2019) ‘Joint action goals reduce visuomotor interference effects from a partner’s incongruent actions’ (1st author of 6) in Nature’s Scientific Reports [pdf; appendix]

(2017) ‘Naïve Realism and Unconscious Perception: a reply to Berger and Nanay’ (w/ Alfonso Anaya) in Analysis [pdf]

Things under review

• Paper arguing that humans have innate concepts of precise natural numbers, like 7, 11, and 62 [Pre-print: Number Nativism]
• Experimental study examining the claim that the approximate number system represents rational numbers, and arguing that rational numbers are encoded in a part/whole format, like a fraction (w/ Chuyan Qu and Elizabeth Brannon) [Pre-print: Rational Number Representations by the ANS] R&R
• Part experimental, part philosophical paper arguing that size adaptation is weird(w/ Sami Yousif) [Pre-print: Size Adaptation; for more, see: https://www.cogdevlab.org/size-adaptation/demos] R&R
• Experimental study examining the effects of color on stimulus complexity in mental rotation tasks (w/ Assaf Weksler, Eitan Hemed, Ariel Goldstein, and Baruch Eitman)

In Progress (please email for drafts/results)