Research
My research focuses on two main areas that explore the complexity of animal minds. The first involves studying bird behavior, particularly social cognition. Birds, like pigeons, have remarkable ways of interacting with one another, and through my work, I aim to uncover how they perceive and respond to their peers. For example, I investigate how pigeons recognize individuals using different senses, how they interpret abstract social cues, and how they learn by observing others within their flocks.
The second part of my research aims to understand the evolution of cognition through the avian brain. Using neuroimaging techniques, such as fMRI, I explore the brain’s neural pathways that govern social and emotional processing in birds. By understanding how pigeons process social interactions, and recognize “emotions”, we gain insight into the evolutionary roots of social cognition.
Beyond behavior and neuroscience, I think seriously about consciousness, particularly what it means for an animal to have a subjective experience of the world.
The question “are animals conscious?” feels too blunt to be useful. What interests me more is how do different animals experience the world, and why do those experiences differ so dramatically across species? Every animal has evolved a nervous system shaped by its ecology, its body, and its evolutionary history. A pigeon navigating a city, a bee weighing options in a flower patch, an octopus hunting in the dark, each inhabits a reality structured by different senses, different needs, different time scales. Jakob von Uexküll called this the Umwelt: the unique perceptual universe each species constructs from the world around it.
I believe the Umwelt concept offers something consciousness science is currently missing: a framework that takes biological diversity seriously, rather than measuring all minds against the human standard. Understanding consciousness means understanding the full range of ways it can exist, not just the one way we happen to know from the inside.
Methods and research interests
- Social Cognition
- fMRI
- Animal Behavior
- Comparative Psychology
- Evolution of Cognition
- Consciousness
- Computational Ethology
- Computational Neuroscience