My primary research project, which grows out of my dissertation, explores our capacity to recognize people, places, and things. My secondary research project concerns the purported richness of visual experience. I provide a more detailed overview of both projects below.
Part of my motivation for studying the recognitional capacity is my conviction that it has an underappreciated significance within our everyday lives. This is made apparent by disruptions to the recognitional capacity, which can leave us disoriented and alienated from our loved ones (see ‘A Puzzle Concerning the Role of Affect in Recognition’). It is also clear when we learn about our difficulty in recognizing individuals of other races—a phenomenon known as the cross-race effect. While we are largely unaware of our susceptibility to the cross-race effect (see ‘Towards a Two-Factor Theory of the Cross-Race Effect’), it can nonetheless lead to enduring racial harms (see ‘Racism and the Cross-Race Effect’).
All my work is interdisciplinary in nature. This often takes the form of integrating experimental findings from psychology, neuroscience, and vision science with philosophical argumentation (see ‘Recognition and the Perception-Cognition Divide’ and ‘The Irreducibility of Recognition’). However, I also engage with empirical work directly, drawing the interest of philosophers and non-philosophers alike (see ‘Deflating Inflation’).
Primary Research Project: The Recognitional Capacity
‘Recognition and the Perception-Cognition Divide,’ in Mind & Language, 2021
Recent discussions have fixated on the distinction between perception and cognition. How should recognition be understood in light of this distinction? The relevant sense of recognition involves a sensitivity to particulars from one’s past. Recognizing the face of a familiar friend is one instance of this phenomenon, as is recognizing an object or place that one has viewed before. In this article, I argue that recognition is an interface capacity that straddles the border between perception and cognition.
‘The Irreducibility of Recognition,’ under review
Philosophers have highlighted the significance of recognition by arguing that it is a precondition for other important aspects of thought. Likewise, psychologists and neuroscientists have explored the subpersonal underpinnings of recognition. But what is it for a subject to recognize a familiar person, place, or thing? After considering a handful of candidate answers to this question, I explore the possibility that there is a sense in which recognition eludes explanation. I develop this suggestion and offer a meta-explanation for why it is true: Recognition cannot be explained because it is an irreducible mental capacity.
This article was awarded the Shwayder Prize ‘in recognition of genuinely accomplished work on the part of our graduate students, work of the kind that goes considerably beyond the level necessary for successful completion of the course requirements in our graduate program’ by the Department of Philosophy at U.C. Berkeley. This prize is awarded to one student per year.
‘A Puzzle Concerning the Role of Affect in Recognition,’ under review
Recognition and feeling go hand in hand. But how exactly should we understand the role of affect in recognition? According to Constitutivists, part of what it is to recognize a person, place, or thing is to enjoy a certain affective response. In contrast, Causalists hold that affect is only causally implicated in recognition. I introduce Capgras syndrome—a condition characterized by the delusion that one’s loved ones have been replaced by imposters—as a case study for exploring the disagreement between Causalists and Constitutivists. I suggest three ways of resolving the disagreement and show why none are particularly satisfying.
‘Towards a Two-Factor Theory of the Cross-Race Effect,’ under review
The cross-race effect is standardly characterized as the finding that individuals are generally better at recognizing previously observed faces of members of their own race than faces of members of other races. While the cross-race effect is a well-replicated finding, there is little agreement about the mechanisms underlying it. After outlining existing theories of the cross-race effect, I argue that they all face a similar problem. They at most explain our difficulty in recognizing other-race faces relative to own-race faces. However, a complete explanation of the cross-race effect must account for our difficulty in recognizing other-race faces along with our limited metacognitive awareness of this difficulty. I hypothesize that this limited metacognitive awareness is a product of our tacit yet mistaken assumption that we can recognize individuals all races equally well. One prediction of this hypothesis, which is borne out, is that subjects judge themselves to be equally likely to recognize individuals regardless of their race. This prediction is not offered by a competing hypothesis which appeals to our general tendency towards overconfidence when task performance is suboptimal.
‘Racism and the Cross-Race Effect,’ in progress
We are generally worse off at recognizing individuals of other races than individuals of our own race. In this article, I ask: What is the connection between racism and this cross-race effect? This question breaks down into a series of more specific ones. Does racism cause the cross-race effect? Is the cross-race effect a cause of racism? Is the cross-race effect itself racist? The answers to these questions depend on whether individuals or social institutions are assumed to be conceptually foundational in understanding racism. Nevertheless, I find that the most compelling arguments indicate that the cross-race effect is a cause of racism.
Secondary Research Project: The Richness of Visual Experience
Vision presents us with a richly detailed world. Yet, there is a range of limitations in the processing of visual information, such as poor peripheral resolution and failures to notice things we do not attend. This raises a natural question: How do we seem to see so much when there is considerable evidence indicating otherwise? In an elegant series of studies, Lau and colleagues have offered a novel answer to this long-standing question, proposing that our sense of visual richness is an artifact of decisional and metacognitive deficits. I critically evaluate this proposal and conclude that it rests on questionable presuppositions concerning the relationship between decisional and metacognitive processes, on one hand, and visual phenomenology, on the other.
See here for reply piece by JD Knotts, Matthias Michel, and Brian Odegaard.
‘The Richness of Visual Experience,’ in progress
Visual experience is often said to be richly detailed; and this claim is treated as common ground in a number of debates within the philosophy of mind, such as debates over phenomenal overflow and conceptual/non-conceptual content. But what exactly does it mean for visual experience to be rich? I clarify how the notion of experiential richness is ambiguous between the number of items simultaneously presented in one’s visual experience (‘capacity’) and the detail with which each item is presented (‘specificity’). While capacity and specificity are both genuine properties of one’s visual experience, I argue that considerations relating to the transparency of experience undermine claims of experiential richness made on the basis of introspection.