In collaboration with Nir Fresco, we will investigate whether or how representational, computational and mechanistic explanation in cognitive neuroscience relate. We start from the observation of an (apparent) tension:  neuroscientific mechanistic explanations can prima facie refer exclusively to factors within the brain. Representational properties, though, supervene on the organism’s relations to its external world and/or past. This raises, what we dub, the compatibility challenge: can explanations in cognitive neuroscience be simultaneously mechanistic and representational?

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Can the body or elements of the environment be constituents of cognitive processes? What does it mean to be a constituent of cognition? How can we empirically find constituents? As a part of the Meta-questions project, I investigate how we can empirically and theoretically distinguish inputs/outputs of cognition from constituents of cognition.

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Biologists explain phenomena by describing mechanisms that are responsible for these phenomena. What are mechanisms? What are the ontological commitments of biology implied by this explanatory practice? In a recent book and various articles, I provide a realist interpretation of mechanisms and show which consequences follow for philosophical theories of causation, constitution, levels of science, and explanation.

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There is a growing consensus among psychologists and philosophers that many of our mental processes occur unconsciously. What does it mean for a mental process to be unconscious? How do scientists justify the postulation of unconscious mental processes? In a recent paper, I ask these questions with respect to one phenomenon that is currently a hot topic in philosophy and psychology: implicit bias.

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As a subproject of the RTG "Situated Cognition" and together with my former PhD-student, Matej Kohár, I investigated the theoretical basis of 4E-approaches to cognition.