Ophelia Deroy

Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München
Institute of Philosophy, University of London
  •  1394
    How do synesthetes experience the world
    In Mohan Matthen (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  •  905
    Beyond vision: The vertical integration of sensory substitution devices
    In D. Stokes, M. Matthen & S. Biggs (eds.), Perception and Its Modalities, Oxford University Press. 2015.
    What if a blind person could 'see' with her ears? Thanks to Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs), blind people now have access to out-of-reach objects, a privilege reserved so far for the sighted. In this paper, we show that the philosophical debates have fundamentally been mislead to think that SSDs should be fitted among the existing senses or that they constitute a new sense. Contrary to the existing assumption that they get integrated at the sensory level, we present a new thesis according to…Read more
  •  339
    Cognitive states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions, may influence how we perceive people and objects. If this is the case, are those influences worse when they occur implicitly rather than explicitly? Here we show that cognitive penetration in perception generally involves an implicit component. First, the process of influence is implicit, making us unaware that our perception is misrepresenting the world. This lack of awareness is the source of the epistemic threat raised by cognitive pe…Read more
  •  329
    Coordinating attention requires coordinated senses
    with Lucas Battich and Merle T. Fairhurst
    Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 27 (6): 1126-1138. 2020.
    From playing basketball to ordering at a food counter, we frequently and effortlessly coordinate our attention with others towards a common focus: we look at the ball, or point at a piece of cake. This non-verbal coordination of attention plays a fundamental role in our social lives: it ensures that we refer to the same object, develop a shared language, understand each other’s mental states, and coordinate our actions. Models of joint attention generally attribute this accomplishment to gaze co…Read more
  •  225
    Spatial certainty : Feeling is the truth
    with Merle Fairhurst
    In Spatial senses, Routleged. 2019.
    A common sense view is illustrated by Doubting Thomas, and surfaces in many philosophical and psychological writings : Touching is better than seeing. But can we make sense of this privilege? We rule out that it could mean that touch is more informative than vision, more ‘objective’ or more directly in contact with reality. Instead, we propose that touch offers not a perceptual, but a metacognitive advantage: touch is not more objective than vision but rather provides comparatively higher subj…Read more
  •  194
    Algorithmic Nudging: The Need for an Interdisciplinary Oversight
    with Christian Schmauder, Jurgis Karpus, Maximilian Moll, and Bahador Bahrami
    Topoi 42 (3): 799-807. 2023.
    Nudge is a popular public policy tool that harnesses well-known biases in human judgement to subtly guide people’s decisions, often to improve their choices or to achieve some socially desirable outcome. Thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) methods new possibilities emerge of how and when our decisions can be nudged. On the one hand, algorithmically personalized nudges have the potential to vastly improve human daily lives. On the other hand, blindly outsourcing the deve…Read more
  •  151
    The impact of joint attention on the sound-induced flash illusions
    with Lucas Battich, Isabelle Garzorz, and Basil Wahn
    Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics 83 (8). 2021.
    Humans coordinate their focus of attention with others, either by gaze following or prior agreement. Though the effects of joint attention on perceptual and cognitive processing tend to be examined in purely visual environments, they should also show in multisensory settings. According to a prevalent hypothesis, joint attention enhances visual information encoding and processing, over and above individual attention. If two individuals jointly attend to the visual components of an audiovisual eve…Read more
  •  96
    Fermented thoughts (review)
    The Philosophers' Magazine 48 (48): 104-105. 2010.
  •  82
    Categorising without Concepts
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (3): 465-478. 2019.
    A strong claim, often found in the literature, is that it is impossible to categorize perceptual properties unless one possesses the related concepts. The evidence from visual perception reviewed in this paper however questions this claim: Concepts, at least canonically defined, are ill-suited to explain perceptual categorisation, which is a fast, and crucially a largely involuntary and unconscious process, which rests on quickly updated probabilistic calculations. I suggest here that perceptual…Read more
  •  71
    Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception, by Bence Nanay (review)
    Mind 126 (502): 635-643. 2017.
    Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception, by Bence Nanay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 240.
  •  57
    How automatic are crossmodal correspondences?
    with Charles Spence
    Consciousness and Cognition 22 (1): 245-260. 2013.
    The last couple of years have seen a rapid growth of interest in the study of crossmodal correspondences – the tendency for our brains to preferentially associate certain features or dimensions of stimuli across the senses. By now, robust empirical evidence supports the existence of numerous crossmodal correspondences, affecting people’s performance across a wide range of psychological tasks – in everything from the redundant target effect paradigm through to studies of the Implicit Association …Read more
  •  49
    Spatial Senses: Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science (edited book)
    with Tony Cheng and Charles Spence
    Routledge. 2019.
    This collection of essays brings together research on sense modalities in general and spatial perception in particular in a systematic and interdisciplinary way. It updates a long-standing philosophical fascination with this topic by incorporating theoretical and empirical research from cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. The book is divided thematically to cover a wide range of established and emerging issues. Part I covers notions of objectivity and subjectivity in spatial percept…Read more
  •  48
    Worlds of Truth: A Philosophy of Knowledge
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 24 (4): 446-448. 2010.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  34
    The Importance of Being Able
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 10 (1): 43-61. 2010.
    The paper aims at reconsidering the problem of “practical knowledge” at a proper level of generality, and at showing the role that personal abilities play in it. The notion of “practical knowledge” has for long been the focus of debates both in philosophy and related areas in psychology. It has been wholly captured by debates about ‘knowledge’ and has more recently being challenged in its philosophical foundations as targeting a specific attitude of ‘knowing-how’. But what are the basic facts ac…Read more
  •  34
    We provide a new account of the oft-mentioned special character of touch, showing that its superior reliability is subjective rather than objective : Touch provides higher certainty than vision, for the same level of objective accuracy.
  •  34
    Categorizing Smells: A Localist Approach
    Cognitive Science 45 (1). 2021.
    Humans are poorer at identifying smells and communicating about them, compared to other sensory domains. They also cannot easily organize odor sensations in a general conceptual space, where geometric distance could represent how similar or different all odors are. These two generalities are more or less accepted by psychologists, and they are often seen as connected: If there is no conceptual space for odors, then olfactory identification should indeed be poor. We propose here an important revi…Read more
  •  23
    Sensory Blending: On Synaesthesia and Related Phenomena (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    Synaesthesia is a strange sensory blending: synaesthetes report experiences of colours or tastes associated with particular sounds or words. This volume presents new essays by scientists and philosophers exploring what such cases can tell us about the nature of perception and its boundaries with illusion and imagination.
  •  22
    Belief in substance dualism, the idea that mind and matter are two different kinds of substances, has been found to be a strong predictor of belief in free will. Why? Here, we test whether believing that mind and matter are different kinds of substance correlates with differences in how people think of free will and/or differences in how people interpret the scenarios used to test their conceptions. We provided participants (N = 515) with two hypothetical scenarios where the world was presented …Read more
  •  21
    The clear and not so clear signatures of perceptual reality in the Bayesian brain
    with Sofiia Rappe
    Consciousness and Cognition 103 (C): 103379. 2022.
  •  21
    Do Our Brains Make Us Utilitarians?
    with Marwa El Zein
    The Philosophers' Magazine 83 87-93. 2018.
  •  20
    Categorizing Smells: A Localist Approach
    Cognitive Science 45 (1): 1-26. 2021.
    Humans are poorer at identifying smells and communicating about them, compared to othersensory domains. They also cannot easily organise odour sensations in a general conceptual space like with colours. We challenge the conclusion that there is no olfactory conceptual map at all. Instead we propose a new framework, with local conceptual spaces.
  •  18
    Despite facing significant criticism for assigning human-like characteristics to artificial intelligence, phrases like “trustworthy AI” are still commonly used in official documents and ethical guidelines. It is essential to consider why institutions continue to use these phrases, even though they are controversial. This article critically evaluates various reasons for using these terms, including ontological, legal, communicative, and psychological arguments. All these justifications share the …Read more
  •  14
    Voice over: Audio-visual congruency and content recall in the gallery setting
    with Merle T. Fairhurst and Minnie Scott
    PLoS ONE 12 (6). 2017.
    Experimental research has shown that pairs of stimuli which are congruent and assumed to 'go together' are recalled more effectively than an item presented in isolation. Will this multisensory memory benefit occur when stimuli are richer and longer, in an ecological setting? In the present study, we focused on an everyday situation of audio-visual learning and manipulated the relationship between audio guide tracks and viewed portraits in the galleries of the Tate Britain. By varying the gender …Read more
  •  11
    Many heads are more utilitarian than one
    with Anita Keshmirian and Bahador Bahrami
    Cognition 220 (C): 104965. 2022.
  •  10
    Racial bias in face perception is sensitive to instructions but not introspection
    with Eoin Travers and Merle T. Fairhurst
    Consciousness and Cognition 83 102952. 2020.