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1Norms affect prospective causal judgmentsCognitive Science 45 (1). 2021.People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—that is, judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as…Read more
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6Modeling confidence in causal judgments.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 153 (8): 2142. 2024.Counterfactual theories propose that people’s capacity for causal judgment depends on their ability to consider alternative possibilities: The lightning strike caused the forest fire because had it not struck, the forest fire would not have ensued. To accommodate a variety of psychological effects on causal judgment, a range of recent accounts have proposed that people probabilistically sample counterfactual alternatives from which they compute a graded measure of causal strength. While such mod…Read more
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387Episodic memory without autonoetic consciousnessPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. forthcoming.Ever since Tulving’s influential 1985 article “Memory and Consciousness” it has become traditional to think of autonoetic consciousness as necessary for episodic memory. This paper questions this claim. Specifically, it argues that the construct of autonoetic consciousness lacks validity and that, even if it was valid, it would still not be necessary for episodic memory. The paper ends with a proposal to go back to a functional/computational characterization of episodic memory in which its chara…Read more
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222The mirage of big-data phrenologyThe British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.The goal of mapping psychological functions to brain structures has a venerable history. With the advent of neuroimaging techniques, this elusive goal regained vigor and became the main purpose of cognitive neuroscience. Unfortunately, as the field continues to develop, the ideal of finding one-to-one mappings from psychological functions to brain areas looks increasingly unrealistic. In the past few years, however, many cognitive neuroscientists have advocated for mining large sets of neuroimag…Read more
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351The impact of error-consequence severity on cue processing in importance-biased prospective memoryCerebral Cortex Communications. forthcoming.Prospective memory (PM) enables people to remember to complete important tasks in the future. Failing to do so can result in consequences of varying severity. Here, we investigated how PM error-consequence severity impacts the neural processing of relevant cues for triggering PM and the ramification of that processing on the associated prospective task performance. Participants role-played a cafeteria worker serving lunches to fictitious students and had to remember to deliver an alternative lun…Read more
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480Introduction to the topical collection ‘locating representations in the brain: interdisciplinary perspectives’Synthese 203 (5): 1-18. 2024.
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21Looking at Mental Images: Eye‐Tracking Mental Simulation During Retrospective Causal JudgmentCognitive Science 48 (3). 2024.How do people evaluate causal relationships? Do they just consider what actually happened, or do they also consider what could have counterfactually happened? Using eye tracking and Gaussian process modeling, we investigated how people mentally simulated past events to judge what caused the outcomes to occur. Participants played a virtual ball‐shooting game and then—while looking at a blank screen—mentally simulated (a) what actually happened, (b) what counterfactually could have happened, or (c…Read more
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353The emotional impact of baseless discrediting of knowledge: An empirical investigation of epistemic injusticeActa Psychologica 244. 2024.According to theoretical work on epistemic injustice, baseless discrediting of the knowledge of people with marginalized social identities is a central driver of prejudice and discrimination. Discrediting of knowledge may sometimes be subtle, but it is pernicious, inducing chronic stress and coping strategies such as emotional avoidance. In this research, we sought to deepen the understanding of epistemic injustice’s impact by examining emotional responses to being discredited and assessing if m…Read more
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24On the frequency and nature of the cues that elicit déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memoriesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Barzykowski and Moulin suggest that déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memories recruit similar retrieval processes. Here, we invite the authors to clarify three issues: (1) What mechanism prevents déjà vu to happen more frequently? (2) What is the role of semantic cues in involuntary autobiographical retrieval? and (3) How déjà vu relates to non-believed memories?
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547Simulationism and Memory TracesIn Lynn Nadel & Sara Aronowitz (eds.), Space, Time, and Memory, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.In the philosophy of memory there is a tension between a preservationist and a constructivist view of memory reflected in the debate between causalism and simulationism. Causalism is not only committed to the claim that there must be an appropriate causal connection between the remembered event and the content represented at retrieval but also that such connection is possible because of a content-preserving memory trace. Simulationism, by contrast, rejects the need for an appropriate causal cond…Read more
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33Neuroscience and philosophy (edited book)The MIT Press. 2022.State-of-the-art collection on how neuroscience and philosophy can mutually illuminate each other on core psychological concepts. An interdisciplinary collection in the best sense.
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722“Repressed Memory” Makes No SenseTopics in Cognitive Science 16 (4): 616-629. 2023.The expression “repressed memory” was introduced over 100 years ago as a theoretical term purportedly referring to an unobservable psychological entity postulated by Freud's seduction theory. That theory, however, and its hypothesized cognitive architecture, have been thoroughly debunked—yet the term “repressed memory” seems to remain. In this paper, I offer a philosophical evaluation of the meaning of this theoretical term as well as an argument to question its scientific status by comparing it…Read more
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626Norms Affect Prospective Causal JudgmentsCognitive Science 45 (1). 2021.People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm- conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—i.e., judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm- violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as …Read more
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982Cause by Omission and Norm: Not Watering PlantsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (2): 270-283. 2017.People generally accept that there is causation by omission—that the omission of some events cause some related events. But this acceptance elicits the selection problem, or the difficulty of explaining the selection of a particular omissive cause or class of causes from the causal conditions. Some theorists contend that dependence theories of causation cannot resolve this problem. In this paper, we argue that the appeal to norms adequately resolves the selection problem for dependence theories,…Read more
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174An Empirical Refutation of ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can’Analysis 76 (3): 283-290. 2016.Most philosophers assume that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, and most of them hold that this principle is true not only universally but also analytically or conceptually. Some skeptics deny this principle, although they often admit some related one. In this article, we show how new empirical evidence bolsters the skeptics’ arguments. We then defend the skeptical view against some objections to the empirical evidence and to its effect on the traditional principle. In light of the new evidence, we conclud…Read more
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110Against Some Recent Arguments for ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can’: Reasons, Deliberation, Trying, and FurniturePhilosophia 47 (1): 131-139. 2019.Many philosophers claim that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. In light of recent empirical evidence, however, some skeptics conclude that philosophers should stop assuming the principle unconditionally. Streumer, however, does not simply assume the principle’s truth; he provides arguments for it. In this article, we argue that his arguments fail to support the claim that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’.
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1159Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent CulturesCognitive Science 42 (S1): 134-160. 2018.People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to behave in morally good ways. Is this belief particular to individuals with optimistic beliefs or people from Western cultures, or does it reflect a widely held cognitive bias in how people understand the self? To address this question…Read more
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91Perceived similarity of imagined possible worlds affects judgments of counterfactual plausibilityCognition 209 (C): 104574. 2021.People frequently entertain counterfactual thoughts, or mental simulations about alternative ways the world could have been. But the perceived plausibility of those counterfactual thoughts varies widely. The current article interfaces research in the philosophy and semantics of counterfactual statements with the psychology of mental simulations, and it explores the role of perceived similarity in judgments of counterfactual plausibility. We report results from seven studies (N = 6405) jointly su…Read more
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293Recently, psychologists have explored moral concepts including obligation, blame, and ability. While little empirical work has studied the relationships among these concepts, philosophers have widely assumed such a relationship in the principle that “ought” implies “can,” which states that if someone ought to do something, then they must be able to do it. The cognitive underpinnings of these concepts are tested in the three experiments reported here. In Experiment 1, most participants judge that…Read more
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332Moralization and self-control strategy selectionPsychonomic Bulletin and Review 30 (4). 2023.To manage conflicts between temptation and commitment, people use self-control. The process model of self-control outlines different strategies for managing the onset and experience of temptation. However, little is known about the decision-making factors underlying strategy selection. Across three experiments (N = 317), we tested whether the moral valence of a commitment predicts how people advise attentional self-control strategies. In Experiments 1 and 2, people rated attentional focus strate…Read more
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390Not Every Thing Must GoJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience. forthcoming.In The Entangled Brain, Pessoa criticizes standard approaches in cognitive neuroscience in which the brain is seen as a functionally decomposable, modular system with causal operations built up hierarchically. Instead, he advocates for an emergentist perspective whereby dynamic brain networks are associated, not with traditional psychological categories, but with behavioral functions characterized in evolutionary terms. Here, we raise a number of concerns with such a radical approach. We ultimat…Read more
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1145Mental control and attributions of blame for negligent wrongdoingJournal of Experimental Psychology: General. forthcoming.Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ menta…Read more
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26The Efficacy of Downward Counterfactual Thinking for Regulating Emotional Memories in Anxious IndividualsFrontiers in Psychology 12. 2022.Aversive autobiographical memories sometimes prompt maladaptive emotional responses and contribute to affective dysfunction in anxiety and depression. One way to regulate the impact of such memories is to create a downward counterfactual thought–a mental simulation of how the event could have been worse–to put what occurred in a more positive light. Despite its intuitive appeal, counterfactual thinking has not been systematically studied for its regulatory efficacy. In the current study, we comp…Read more
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22Confidence and gradation in causal judgmentCognition 223 (C): 105036. 2022.When comparing the roles of the lightning strike and the dry climate in causing the forest fire, one might think that the lightning strike is more of a cause than the dry climate, or one might think that the lightning strike completely caused the fire while the dry conditions did not cause it at all. Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether such causal judgments are graded; that is, whether people treat some causes as stronger than others. To address this debate, we first reanaly…Read more
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1007Multivariate pattern analysis and the search for neural representationsSynthese 199 (5-6): 12869-12889. 2021.Multivariate pattern analysis, or MVPA, has become one of the most popular analytic methods in cognitive neuroscience. Since its inception, MVPA has been heralded as offering much more than regular univariate analyses, for—we are told—it not only can tell us which brain regions are engaged while processing particular stimuli, but also which patterns of neural activity represent the categories the stimuli are selected from. We disagree, and in the current paper we offer four conceptual challenges…Read more
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50Memory and Counterfactual Simulations for Past Wrongdoings Foster Moral Learning and ImprovementCognitive Science 45 (6). 2021.In four studies, we investigated the role of remembering, reflecting on, and mutating personal past moral transgressions to learn from those moral mistakes and to form intentions for moral improvement. Participants reported having ruminated on their past wrongdoings, particularly their more severe transgressions, and they reported having frequently thought about morally better ways in which they could have acted instead (i.e., morally upward counterfactuals; Studies 1–3). The more that participa…Read more
Durham, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
PhilPapers Editorships
Memory and Cognitive Science |