About my work
COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu. Is this statement true? How confident are you? My research focuses on the psychology behind what you take to be true and how confident you are. I am especially interested in the role that emotional states play for our truth and confidence judgments. Specifically, I try to understand whether there are emotional states that are prime determinants of our truth and confidence judgments in that they make us feel that something is true and underlie our sense of confidence. In my work I try to combine the analytical rigour of philosophy with the empirical tools of cognitive science.
Areas of interest:
Emotion; Affective Experience; Intuition; Metacognition
I am working on:
I am developing a way to empirically test whether we have affective states whose function is to signal truth and falsity.
At the same time, I am trying to map out ways how contextual factors such as stakes might affect our confidence judgments and how we can make sense of “biases” in metacognition such as our tendency to be overconfident.
I have worked on:
I wrote my dissertation at the Institut Jean Nicod (ENS, CNRS) in Paris where I developed a theory of intuitions (about truth) understood as a kind of affective experience. This account has been jointly informed by philosophical and empirical work.
Publications
Fernandez Velasco, P., Loev, S. Affective experience in the predictive mind: a review and new integrative account. Synthese (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02755-4
Are you interested in emotions? Are you interested in a grand unifying theory of the mind? Or, perhaps, you’re interested in both? If so then you might find this article interesting. One of its contributions is a review of emotion theories in the predictive processing framework, a candidate for a grand unifying theory of the mind. Another is the development of a new emotion theory in the predictive processing framework.
CVBE Projects
This project is about X.