Since joining the department in 2017, my work has focussed mainly on the interface between philosophy and STEM subjects. Much of my work is on interdisciplinary topics connected to consciousness, perception, and attention. I'm also very interested in robotics, especially the project of making robots more culturally sensitive. My work in these areas is collected in my papers (below).
One of my current interests is in the realm of psychological natural kinds. Broadly, the study of natural kinds is the study of scientific categories and categorisation. Both scientists and laypeople typically divide the mind up into a variety of different faculties (such as memory, emotions, consciousness, vision and so on). I am interested in how these categorisation judgements are made, and how they help psychologists achieve scientific success.
I am also fascinated by cultural robotics. People from different cultural backgrounds have different expectations around robots and robotics, including things like personal space, expression of emotion, cultural habits, etc. I'm interested in questions like the following: Can we design robots to behave in ways that differ depending on the cultural preferences of the humans they're interacting with? Should we do this? What does 'culture' even mean in robotics?