I’m an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. I’m also cross-appointed in Psychology. Before moving to LA, I got a DPhil at Oxford and held research fellowships at York and Penn.

I work at the intersection between philosophy of mind and cognitive science and I’m particularly interested in non-linguistic cognition – i.e., psychological processes that emerge independently of natural language and cognitive processes that don’t involve linguistically structured representations. 

I’m currently working on philosophical and empirical projects to do with perceptual adaptation, concept nativism, rational learning, and how this all relates to advances in AI.

Published & Forthcoming Papers

(to appear) ‘Three brands of concept nativism’ (w/ Alexis Wellwood) in Analysis [pdf]

(to appear) ‘Number, Adaptation, and Perception’ (w/ Sami Yousif), in J. Park et al. [eds.] Numerical Cognition: Debates and Disputes [pdf]

(to appear) ‘Cardinality, numerousness, and autoscaling: Revisiting the content and format of the approximate number system’ (w/ Jake Beck) in J. Park et al. [eds.] Numerical Cognition: Debates and Disputes [pdf]

(2026) ‘Can we “see” value? Spatiotopic “visual” adaptation to an imperceptible dimension’ (w/ Sami Yousif) in Cognition [pdf]

(2025) ‘Children’s number judgments are influenced by connectedness’ (w/ Chuyan Qu, Francesca Luzzi, and Elizabeth Brannon) in Developmental Science [pdf] 

  • An accessible write-up at PsyPost.org, with lots of Sam quotes, appears here

(2025) ‘Seven reasons to (still) doubt the existence of number adaptation: A rebuttal to Burr et al. and Durgin’ (w/ Sami Yousif & Liz Brannon) in Cognition [pdf]

  • Responds to David Burr, Roberto Arrighi, & Giovanni Anobile and Frank Durgin’s commentaries on our paper, ‘Number Adaptation: A Critical Look’, also in Cognition.

(2025) ‘Number Nativism’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research [pdf]

(2024) ‘Size Adaptation: Do You Know It When You See It? (w/ Sami Yousif) in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics [pdf]

  • Size adaptation is weird. See here for demos [link]

(2024) ‘Rational Number Representation by the Approximate Number System’ (w/ Chuyan Qu, Francesca Luzzi & Liz Brannon) in Cognition [pdf]

  • Tests some of the claims that Jake Beck and I made about the contents of approximate number representations in our (2021) BBS target article [pdf]

(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 the replies and our rebuttal 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

(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 about a puzzle concerning the dissociation between subitizing and approximate number representation in developmental psychology [pdf] (R&R @M&L)
  • Multi-site, adversarial collaboration, testing our previous failure to replicate cross-modal number adaptation (w/ Yousif, Sami; Arrighi, Roberto; Brannon, Elizabeth; Togoli, Irene; Vig, Zachary; Artemenko, Christina; Baer, Carolyn; Cheng, Chen; He, Yunfeng; Lau, Shermine; Luna, Michelle; McNeil, Nicole; Moscoso, Paula; Ngieng, Shih; Nuerk, Hans-Christoph; Odic, Darko; Park, Joonkoo; Piazza, Manuela; Soltanlou, Mojtaba; West, Eloise; Yeo, Darren, R&R @Psych Science)
  • Paper exploring the bounds of visual adaptation (w/ Rachel Olugbusi & Sami Yousif, R&R @PB&R) [pdf]
  • Paper identifying the real reason we should be concept nativists. [pdf]

In Progress (please email for drafts/results) 

  • Paper arguing that visual images have syntactic structure [a short version of this paper was joint winner of the Tenth Annual Essay Prize at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp]
  • Paper on what innateness is, in the age of neural networks.
  • Paper on the imprecision of perceptually represented magnitudes.
  • Paper about number concepts (w/ Alexis Wellwood)
  • Paper considering what causal adaptation effects tell us about the perception of causality (w/ Sami Yousif)
  • Target article about the uses and abuses of ‘visual adaptation’ in the philosophy and psychology of perception (w/ Sami Yousif)
  • Experimental paper showing that our accuracy in making economic value judgements conforms to Weber’s Law (w/ Sami Yousif)

Less Developed, But Also in Progress

  • Paper asking whether infants represent intentions or just actions/teleological goals
  • Paper about negation (w/ Victor Gomes)
  • Paper arguing that there is no generalized magnitude system (w/ Jake Beck)
  • Paper arguing for a methodological essentialism about natural kinds in psychology (w/ Jake Quilty-Dunn)