Epistemology & Cognition Lab
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences
Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences
The research in the lab combines philosophical and experimental work. The latter kind is based on philosophical questions (primarily in epistemology) that are decomposed into smaller, more specific behaviourally testable questions.
Purely philosophical questions include:
- What is the nature of physical computation as it is conceived in cognitive explanations?
- How are physical computational processes individuated?
- What is the explanatory role of computation in cognitive explanations?
- How should 'information' be understood for it to play its central explanatory role in the cognitive sciences?
- If 'information' is understood functionally (i.e., as being receiver-dependent), can it still be scientifically legitimate and objective?
- What are the limitations of the ambitious project to explain behaviour, perception, and cognition using the predictive processing framework alone (i.e., the brain as a Bayesian hypothesis tester)?
- In what respects are knowledge-that (roughly, knowledge of facts) and knowledge-how (roughly, procedural knowledge) similar and different?
- Does knowledge-how amount to skillful knowledge?
Current active experimental projects focus on the relation amongst learning, skill acquisition, and automaticity.
- Can cognitive control improve (i.e., become faster and more accurately executed) with practice?
- Does the mere performance of automatic cognitive processes (e.g, reading words or numbers) improve the performance of other cognitively-controlled tasks (e.g., classification tasks)?
- Is such improvement confined to same-domain processing (reading words -> concept classification) or not (reading numbers -> concept classification)?
- Can the Stroop effect (as a paradigmatic case of automatic processing) be suppressed over time (e.g., after practicing the same task for several weeks)?
- How do automatisation and inhibition interact over time while practicing a particular task?
Most recent publications:
Abstract. The Stroop task is widely used to study attentional control and cognitive flexibility. However, questions about its sensitivity to training and the impact of task conflict on attentional control remain open. We investigated the effects of practice and task conflict on attentional control in the Stroop task, with participants completing four sessions of a Stroop task over 3 weeks in low and high task-conflict conditions. Our results show that the level of task conflict had an impact only in the first session, even though participants remained sensitive to task conflict throughout all four sessions. Moreover, we found that practice reduced response times in the Stroop task, for both congruent and incongruent trials. Nevertheless, the interference between congruent and incongruent stimuli remained consistent over the 3-week period, indicating that inter-condition interference is not affected by training. Our study, therefore, suggests that the extent to which the level of task conflict modulates Stroop task performance is only partially sensitive to training. These findings provide further insights into the role of task conflict and practice in attentional control and cognitive flexibility.
Abstract. One type of computational indeterminacy arises from partitioning a system’s physical state space into state types that correspond to the abstract state types underlying the computation concerned. The mechanistic individuative strategy posits that computation can be uniquely identified through either narrow physical properties exclusively or wide, proximal properties. The semantic strategy posits that computation should be uniquely identified through semantic properties. We develop, and defend, an alternative functional individuative strategy that appeals—when needed—to wide, distal functions. We claim that there is no actual computation outside of a functional context. Desiderata for the underlying notion of teleofunction are discussed.