My research lies in the overlap between philosophy and several branches of psychology. My interests in this area are pretty broad, but I am especially interested in the nature of thought.

 

One part of my work, which includes my dissertation and related papers, focuses on the structure of thought. The central idea is a familiar one: that most thinking has a structure similar to a formal language. In other words, there is a syntax for thought. This thesis applies to parts of the mind that do not seem especially logical or language-like, such as perception. And, I argue, it applies even to the minds of animal species that lack natural language. Recently, I have been interested in ways that syntactic structure can differ between species or between subsystems of a single mind, how a mind might implement several kinds of mental representation (for example, language-like representations, and map-like ones) at the same time, and how a single thought might integrate picture-like elements with language-like ones. 

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Another part of my work focuses on thought's interface with cognitive processes.​ Many of my recent publications are on this topic. My co-author Eric Mandelbaum and I argue that the current state of the art of the cognitive science of belief supports a specific suite of robust--if counterintuitive--generalizations about how beliefs are formed, stored, and changed in the mind. We think this model outperforms some rival accounts, such as epistemic vigilance, and offers a more promising outlook for experimental research. We also think it has promising applications to the clinical treatment of delusions. We have some ongoing experimental projects on the mechanisms belief fixation, in collaboration with Ryan Tracy and Steve Young. Recent papers look at how repeating information, or making it easier to read, can influence our tendency to think it's true, as well as when and why people believe pseudoprofound bullshit.

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My interests outside of the broad domain of the nature of thought are varied. The largest of these is my experimental work in semantics, in which I have applied tools from developmental cognition for the first time to the study of linguistic reference. In a paper, Michael Devitt and I report results of studies we designed and ran using these methods to test theories of reference for proper names. Besides being uniformly at odds with classical descriptivism, the results also raise serious methodological concerns for testing reference theories against intuitions--the dominant practice in experimental semantics. A smaller but longstanding project focuses on the perception of pictures. In particular I have been interested in how we manage to see events, causal relations, and broad ("beyond-the-frame") ecological scenes when we look at static images. This project, which reaches back to some visual attention experiments I ran as part of my master's thesis, now involves both experimental and non-experimental projects.

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