Research

Under Review 

A paper on grief [draft]

How do our attitudes toward a deceased loved one change in the grieving process? I identify two conflicting perspectives on this question. Some hold that grief connects us to the dead, and that the connection wanes as grief diminishes. Others hold that grief disconnects from the dead, and that the connection is restored as grief diminishes. This paper reconciles the two perspectives by showing that each perspective reflects a distinct aspect of love. The first perspective concerns a form of attachment, while the second perspective concerns a kind of attention. 

Publications

Response duration tracks confidence, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(29), 2026, with Hanbei Zhou, Ian Phillips, and Chaz Firestone. 

This paper introduces a new measure of subjective confidence in psychological experiments, namely response duration, which is the amount of time the subject holds down the key when making the response. We show that response duration tracks confidence across a wide range of experimental paradigms, making it a measure of confidence that is widely available (all it requires is a keypress response and a few lines of code!) and applicable to subjects for whom traditional measures of confidence are difficult to obtain, such as infants and non-human animals.  

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), 2025, 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. 

The perception of silence, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(29), 2023, 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. Here are some demos of the silence illusions reported in the paper.

This paper received extensive media coverage, including in The New York Times, Scientific American, Vox, BBC, Science, and Guardian.