Works in progress
Please email me for drafts.
Individual works:
📝 Degrees of attention, a dichotomy of consciousness?
Forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference Conscious and Unconscious Mind: Commonalities and Differences.
Key words: Phenomenal consciousness, Access consciousness, Degrees of attention.
You can pay more or less attention to things (compare: watching a movie while also playing on your phone, as opposed to focusing solely on the movie). Does this mean that you can also be "more" or "less" conscious of these things? I suggest that it does. Thus, there might be no sharp line dividing conscious and unconscious states.
📝 Attention, precision and the Content View.
Forthcoming in French, R. & Brogaard, B. (eds.). The Roles of Representations in Visual Perception. Springer.
Key words: Representational precision, Phenomenal precision, Perceptual determinacy.
A link between attention and the precision of perception is often drawn in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. Attention is also connected with the determinacy of perceived properties. But philosophers disagree on two points: whether these links concern the contents represented in perception. I propose that the answers to the first question might be different for different properties; case in point: shapes vs. colors.
📝 Consciousness without foreground and background
In preparation.
Key words: Perceptual organisation, Ganzfeld experiences.
Collaborations:
📝👥Enhanced but indeterminate? How attention colours our world.
Submitted; co-authored with Eliška Šimsová (Charles University of Prague/LMU Munich).
Key words: Representationalism, Range contents, Vividness.
Psychological studies show that attended coloured surfaces look brighter and more colourful. Are these modulations changes in determinacy or precision? Determinacy and precision seem to be a matter of the ranges of values attributed in perception. For all we know, the ranges of values attributed by attentive and inattentive experiences might not be different. But this need not entail the falsity of representationalism for colors (as some might argue). We propose an alternative defence of color representationalism based on the notion of vividness.
📝👥Why a wandering mind does not blink: The perceptual benefits of internal diffuse attention.
Under review; co-authored with Jocelyn Yuxing Wang (MIT).
Key words: Attentional blink, Diffuse attention.
Mind wandering is considered a state of distraction. But surprisingly, some psychological studies show that we actually become better at detecting visual targets when we mind-wander instead of paying full attention. We propose that this occurs because mind wandering is a special kind of attention, which is internal and diffuse, and which brings about a concurrent state of external diffuse attention that is specially apt for encoding specific perceptual properties.
This paper was presented at SSPP 2022, in Mobile, Alabama, and (E)SPP 2022 in Milan, Italy (see our poster here)
📝👥Attending to complexity: A minimal unifying model of consciousness
In preparation; co-authored with Wanja Wiese (Ruhr University of Bochum).
Key words: Theories of consciousness, Information generation.
Project recently presented at LMU Early Career Workshop on Philosophy of Mind.