Research

I mainly work in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. My philosophical interests include the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of social cognition (especially their intersection), the relation between perception and memory, the relation between perception and affect, metacognition, conceptual change in infants, and the role of mental representations in psychological explanations. Recently I started dabbling into philosophy of art, and in particular in the question of how we experience artworks for the first time.

In my PhD thesis I proposed an approach to social perception with the aim of showing that we can perceive, without the need to reflect or infer, some social properties in others, such as their agent-hood, their emotional expressions, and their goal-directed actions. Social perception allows us to quickly detect others’ behaviors and engage in direct social interactions. This immediacy is, however, double-edged and can give rise to “social perception illusions”, which can downgrade the accuracy of mindreading.

My current research project focuses on the everyday phenomenon of “first impressions”. What happens when we see something or someone for the first time? I focus mostly on perceptual first impressions (in all all sense modalities), but the broader objective is to explore the phenomenon across cognitive faculties. In order to study first impressions we need to understand the affective aspects of perception, as well as the role that our past experiences and our expectations play in encountering new people, places, and things.

Here is a link to the project’s website (currently under construction): https://firstimpressionsproject.wordpress.com/

I often collaborate with my partner, Michael Murez (Nantes Université & Collège de France). Together we have published papers on the architecture of perceptual mental files in working memory, on the theory of mental files as an empirical hypothesis, and on representational natural kinds.