Regret, learning, and temptation, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 111(3), 2025.
Ever wondered if there's any point in feeling regret? In this paper, I challenge the widely accepted view that regret is valuable because it helps us learn from our mistakes. I then develop a way of meeting the challenge by arguing that regret helps us overcome temptation.
Event-based warping: A relative distortion of time within events, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 154(11), with Hanbei Zhou, Chaz Firestone, and Ian Phillips.
This paper demonstrates a novel temporal illusion in which two tones within an event are heard as further apart in time than two tones not within an event. This illusion shows, surprisingly, that event representations, which are the structures that the mind imposes on the temporal flow of experience, can distort the very temporal properties on which these structures are based.Â
The perception of silence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(29), with Ian Phillips and Chaz Firestone.
Can we hear silence? This paper presents the first empirical test of this question, which suggests that silence can be heard. This paper received extensive media coverage, including in The New York Times, Scientific American, Vox, BBC, Science, and Guardian. Here are some demos of the silence illusions reported in the paper.