Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Warsaw
Exploring Aesthetics through
Cognition, Perception, & Expertise
My research program is defined by a combined expertise in the philosophy of perception and neuroscience, alongside a passion for understanding how style, flair, feeling, metaphor and other aesthetic components of our everyday experience contribute to our skilled capabilities. My research projects are also directed towards treating empirical data as a window into the underlying structures of human experience. I endeavor to find ways in which empirically informed perspectives can nourish and likewise be nourished by an interaction with aesthetic concepts. I have cultivated an expansive research community and diverse set of research opportunities ranging from psychonomic lab work to choreographic conception in the dance studio. The unifying thread running through these projects is my interest in the singular quality of being in the flow. Whether it’s doctors visually analyzing radiographs, artists incubating creative ideas, or the distinctive ways in which athletes leave their stylistic fingerprint upon their performances—there is much to discover at the limit of optimal human activity, consciousness, and expression. Accordingly, below I discuss several of my recent research projects:
To learn more:
​Unconscious intelligence in the skilled control of expert action [Link]
Project 1: Skilled Action &
(un-)Consciousness Control
A veteran rock climber once told me that when she was on the wall and in the “flow,” her hands knew how to grip every hold, her hips knew how to shift to each change in weight, and her feet always found stable pressure beneath her. She described being on the wall in those moments as if she were in third person, watching her body and the wall dance together, synchronized as one. What experts like my friend are able to do with such fluid elegance, absorbed in the life and process of their activity, is as remarkable as it is enigmatic. The phenomenology of skilled absorption affords feelings of mindlessness and simplicity. Yet the cognitive models of expertise tell a different story; one in which skilled absorption is saturated with intelligence and the complexities of robust agency. At the convergence of these two perspectives there is an incongruity which lends itself to a mystery: what really happens in the minds of experts when they perform at their very best? I aim to answer this question by investigating the intersection of conscious and unconscious action control through both cognition and behavior.
Project 2: Creativity & Style
One major way in which unconscious cognition operates in the environment of skilled performance is through creative problem solving. Experts are able to ‘incubate’ creative solutions to challenging problems during modes of automatic, absorbed, flowlike activity. The result is that when experts act automatically with intelligence, they also generate within themselves an ideal environment to act creatively. In this spirit, cognitive theories of skill (Fridland 2015; Christensen et al. 2016; Pavese 2020) and aesthetic theories of creativity (Plato 534a-e; Kant 5:307-308) can be woven together to avoid problems common to both. However, taking creativity as a measure of skill (and vice versa) comes at an empirical cost. It’s just as difficult to measure creativity as it is to measure control in skilled performance. However, I believe that the aesthetic presentation of individual style is a behavioral marker of creativity and intelligence in expert action. In a word, style is the fingerprint of skilled control. Consequently, style may serve as a useful empirical measure for identifying creativity and its skilled correlates in expert cognition.
To learn more:
The role of creativity in skilled action and expertise [Link]
To learn more:
Visual expertise is more than meets the eye: An examination of holistic visual processing in radiologists and architects [Link]
Project 3: Perceptual Expertise
Eye tracking is an empirical window into the behaviors of visual expertise. Using this paradigm, I and a research team investigated the visual search strategies of architects, radiologists, and novices. What we expected to find was a search strategy common to nearly all forms of visual expertise: reliance upon peripheral vision. This result was confirmed (and replicated) for the radiologists; however, to our surprise, we found that expert architects did not exhibit search strategies consistent with reliance upon peripheral visual data. To the contrary, the architects significantly suppressed search behaviors associated with peripheral vision (by a lot - it was surprising!). Following up on this result, we wanted to know how/whether this idiosyncratic form of visual expertise develops in line with experience. To this end, we collected more data and found that intermediately experienced architects also suppress peripheral visual information, but to a lesser degree than experts. I believe that this is due primarily to the creative way in which architects both perceive and imagine.
Project 4: Object Perception
Experts’ visual behavior is vastly different both from novices and from each other across domains. This observation lives at the heart of this shared collaborative project between myself and my postdoctoral supervisor, Aleksandra Mroczko-WÄ…sowicz. The first insight that we develop is the idea that the perceptual system is adaptive and responsive to the personal-level goals and intentions set by perceivers. When goals and success conditions of perception are set, the resulting adaptations to the perceptual system can differ so significantly that two differently-conditioned perceivers may receive the same perceptual information and process it into distinct sets of objects. We call this effect the ‘perceptual frame’ and argue that perceptual framing effects in object perception are not only widespread, but also helpful for classifying otherwise confounding cases of amodal completion and predictive processing. We take this one step further by arguing that object perception can be action-oriented. When perceptual information is processed by the motor system, perceptual objects inherit spatiotemporal content which provides them with a distinctive and motor-sensitive structure. This structure enables such action-oriented perceptual objects to facilitate prediction and successful interaction with the perceiver's perceptual environment.
To learn more:
Accounting for action: Challenging the traditional view of mulimodal perceptual objects [Link]​​
To learn more:
Mind the Body: Creativity, improvisation and play in philosophy & dance [Link]​​
Project 5: Thinking and Moving Through Philosophy & Dance
I am fascinated by how experts move, flow, and react with creatively spontaneous precision. Much of my research centers on empirically informed perspectives regarding the cognitive mappings or causes of such experiences. However, I am also fascinated in philosophical praxis; bringing alive ideas (especially those from the sciences) through engaged research and learning. To this end, I have invited dancers to my philosophy classes to get students moving and thinking about the mind-body problem. I’ve also won grants to fund a university-wide workshop hosting philosophers of cognitive science, aesthetics, and dance in addition to professional choreographers and dancers. In addition to philosophy talks, we also organized dance workshops and hybrid movement-philosophy seminars. The event has inspired a series of multidisciplinary projects focused on the engaged intersection of motion and reflection.