I'm interested in the mind and its place in the natural world. Understanding the mind doesn't only involve thinking about human minds. Animals have minds too, and so might machines. I'm interested in understanding similarities and differences between human and nonhuman minds, using tools from philosophy, cognitive science and AI.
A lot of my recent work focusses on episodic memory - memory for events from our past which we can now 'replay in the mind's eye'. I'm interested in what episodic memory does for us, and whether it's uniquely human. My UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project, 'Episodic Memory: Uniquely Human?', investigates both of these questions, bringing together research about episodic memory in humans, animals and artificial agents. With Chris Krupenye, I am also developing new behavioural tests for episodic memory in great apes.
Beyond episodic memory, I've written about self-recognition, self-awareness and mindreading in animals, and more general methodological issues in animal cognition research. I'm especially interested in areas where scientists disagree sharply about nonhuman minds, despite having access to the same evidence. I'm also interested in the ethical and practical implications of work on animal minds. With Chris Krupenye and Alejandra Echeverri Ochoa, I am investigating how knowledge of animal minds affects peoples' attitudes and behaviour with respect to wildlife conservation.
I also have research interests in the philosophy of biology, especially questions about how to count organisms in tricky cases like conjoined twinning and pregnancy.
A lot of my recent work focusses on episodic memory - memory for events from our past which we can now 'replay in the mind's eye'. I'm interested in what episodic memory does for us, and whether it's uniquely human. My UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project, 'Episodic Memory: Uniquely Human?', investigates both of these questions, bringing together research about episodic memory in humans, animals and artificial agents. With Chris Krupenye, I am also developing new behavioural tests for episodic memory in great apes.
Beyond episodic memory, I've written about self-recognition, self-awareness and mindreading in animals, and more general methodological issues in animal cognition research. I'm especially interested in areas where scientists disagree sharply about nonhuman minds, despite having access to the same evidence. I'm also interested in the ethical and practical implications of work on animal minds. With Chris Krupenye and Alejandra Echeverri Ochoa, I am investigating how knowledge of animal minds affects peoples' attitudes and behaviour with respect to wildlife conservation.
I also have research interests in the philosophy of biology, especially questions about how to count organisms in tricky cases like conjoined twinning and pregnancy.
Publications
Journal Articles
Lady parts and baby parts: What is a foetus? In Press. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
A common-sense picture of pregnancy views the foetus as (a) an organism and (b) approximately baby-shaped. This paper draws on metabolic accounts of the organism to argue that (a) and (b) can't both be true: either the foetus is not an organism, or it is much bigger than we tend to think, overlapping considerably with its mother. I draw out consequences for the metaphysics of birth, our nature and persistence, and the ethical dynamics of pregnancy.
How do we know if animals remember? Proximal functions and the distribution of episodic memory. In Press. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. (With Arieh Schwartz).
Assuming episodic memory is not uniquely human, we should expect it to vary across species. This makes it hard to give a principled account of what 'counts' as an episodic memory system: which features are necessary? We argue that the investigation of episodic memory in animals should be guided by an account of its proximal functions: its most basic selected effects. We develop a preliminary account of episodic memory's proximal functions and use this to show that episodic memory is unlikely to be uniquely human.
Episodic memory in animals. 2025. Philosophy Compass 20 (5): e70037. (With Simon Brown).
This paper provides an overview of the debate about episodic memory in animals aimed at a philosophical audience. We review relevant behavioural evidence, as well as neuroscientific and computational evidence which has been less discussed in philosophy. We then distinguish and evaluate reasons for scepticism about episodic memory in animals, and highlight three pressing philosophical problems underlying these sceptical responses.
Why might animals remember? A Functional Framework for Episodic Memory Research in Comparative Psychology. 2025. Learning & Behaviour 53: 14-30. (With Simon Brown).
Behavioural work with animals often requires taking a functional perspective: looking for cognitive capacities in contexts where they serve a biological function. In this review, we survey the functions that have been proposed for episodic memory and develop a framework for theorising about the function of episodic memory in comparative psychological research. We argue that there is scope for further theoretical elaboration of prominent proposals relating episodic memory to food caching and future-oriented cognition, and that learning-related functions suggested by computational models are a fruitful area for future behavioural research.
Elements of Episodic Memory: Insights from Artificial Agents. 2024. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 379: 20230416. (With Andrea Blomkvist).
Many recent AI systems take inspiration from biological episodic memory. We review these episodic-memory-inspired systems, and propose that they could be used to develop and test theories of episodic memory's function. In particular, we suggest that they highlight two pursuit-worthy hypotheses: that episodic memory plays a role in planning that is independent of future-oriented simulation, and that it is adaptive in virtue of its contributions to fast learning in novel, sparse-reward environments.
Disagreement & Classification in Comparative Cognitive Science. 2024. Noûs, 58 (3): 825-847.
Comparative cognitive science often involves asking questions like 'Do nonhumans have C?', where C is a capacity we take humans to have. These questions often give rise to disagreement. In this paper, I argue that understanding these questions in terms of natural kinds helps us understand why these disagreements arise, and how we can diagnose and resolve them.
The Mnemonic Functions of Episodic Memory. 2022. Philosophical Psychology, 35 (3): 327-349.
What is episodic memory for? Discussions of episodic memory's function often highlight its role in imaginative simulation. But in this paper, I emphasise episodic memory's important mnemonic functions. In particular, I argue that it plays a central role in the storage, encoding and retrieval of semantic memory, analogous to the role played by the 'mind palaces' used by memory champions.
Remembering Events & Representing Time. 2021. Synthese, 199: 2505-2524.
It's natural to think there's a tight connection between episodic memory and the possession of temporal concepts. If this were true, it would suggest certain straightforward evidential connections between temporal cognition and episodic memory in nonhuman animals. I argue that matters are more complicated than this. Episodic memory is memory for events and not for the times they occupy, and is dissociable from temporal understanding. This is not to say that episodic memory and temporal cognition are unrelated, but that the relationship between them cannot be straightforwardly captured by claims about necessity and sufficiency.
Replication, Uncertainty and Progress in Comparative Cognition. 2021. Animal Behaviour and Cognition, 8 (2): 296-304.
Replications are often taken to play both epistemic and demarcating roles in science. I argue that in fields characterised by a high degree of theoretical openness and uncertainty, like comparative cognition, replications sit poorly in these roles. Like other experiments conducted under conditions of uncertainty, they are often equivocal and open to interpretation. As such, they're poorly placed to deliver clear judgments about comparative cognition's reliability or scientific bona fides. I suggest that this should encourage a broader view of both the nature of scientific progress and the role of replication in comparative cognition.
The Impure Phenomenology of Episodic Memory. 2020. Mind and Language 35: 641-660.
Episodic memory has a distinctive phenomenology: it involves 'mentally reliving' a past event. It's been suggested that if episodic memory is characterised in terms of this phenomenology, it will be 'impossible to test' for it in animals - because this is to characterise it in terms of its 'purely phenomenal features', which cannot be detected in nonverbal behaviour. I argue that this is a mistake. The phenomenological features of episodic memory are impure phenomenological features, which can be detected in animal behaviour. So, insisting on a phenomenological characterisation of episodic memory does nothing to damage the prospects for detecting it in nonhuman animals.
Conjoined Twinning & Biological Individuation. 2020. Philosophical Studies 177 (8): 2395-2415.
In dicephalus conjoined twinning, it appears that two heads share a body; in cephalopagus, it appears two bodies share a head. How many human animals are present in these cases? One answer is that there are two in both cases: conjoined twins are precisely that, conjoined twins. Another is that the number of human animals is the same as the apparent number of bodies - so, there is one in dicephalus and two in cephalopagus. I show that both answers are incorrect: on prominent accounts of biological individuation, there is a single human animal in both cases. This has a number of consequences for the debate about what we are.
Mapping the Minds of Others. 2019. Review of Philosophy & Psychology 10 (4): 747-767.
Some mindreaders can ascribe representational states to others. I argue that these mindreaders might differ from one another with respect to the format they take representational states to have. Some might take mental states to be linguistic, whilst others might take them to be map-like or to have another format. Since formats differ in their expressive power and formal features, these differences make a significant difference to the range of mental state attributions a mindreader can make. I close by articulating the significance of this for the study of mindreading in the great apes.
Learning from the Past: Epistemic Generativity and the Function of Episodic Memory. 2019. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (5-6): 242-251. Winner of the 2018 Annual Essay Prize of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp.
I argue that the function of episodic memory is to store information about the past, against the currently orthodox view that it is to support imagining the future. I show that episodic memory is epistemically generative, allowing organisms to learn from past events retroactively. This confers adaptive benefits in three domains: reasoning about the world, skill and social interaction. Given the role played by evolutionary perspectives in comparative research, this argument necessitates a radical shift in the study of episodic memory in nonhumans.
Mirror Self-Recognition & Self-Identification. 2018. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 97 (2): 284-303.
Some animals, including the great apes, are capable of mirror self-recognition. This is widely taken to show that they are self-aware - but there is some disagreement about whether the self-awareness in question is psychological or bodily self-awareness. I argue that self-recognition does not involve psychological self-awareness, but involves more than bodily self-awareness: it also involves 'objective self-awareness', the capacity for first-person thoughts which rest on identification, and are thus vulnerable to error through misidentification.
Chapters
Why is there so much disagreement about animal minds? Forthcoming in D. Curry and L. Daost (Eds.) Introducing Philosophy of Mind, Today (Routledge).
Many questions about the minds of animals inspire persistent disagreement among experts. Why is this? In this chapter, I argue that these questions are about whether animals share a certain cognitive capacity with us; the problem is that it is often unclear exactly what it would mean for this to be true, making these questions about which reasonable people can disagree.
Experience Replay Algorithms and the Function of Episodic Memory. 2025. In S. Aronowitz & L. Nadel (Eds.) Space, Time, and Memory. OUP.
Episodic memory has inspired the development of several ‘experience replay’ algorithms in AI. I ask whether such algorithms might shed light on a puzzle about episodic memory’s function: what does episodic memory contribute to the cognitive systems in which it is found? I argue that experience replay algorithms can serve as idealized models of episodic memory for the purposes of addressing this question. Taking the DQN algorithm as a case study, I suggest that these algorithms provide some support for mnemonic accounts, on which episodic memory’s function lies in the storage, encoding and retrieval of information. By extending and adapting experience replay algorithms, we might gain further insight into episodic memory’s operations and contributions to cognition.
Do Animals Have Episodic Memory? Optimism, Kind Scepticism and Pluralism. 2022. In A. Sant'Anna, C. McCarroll & K. Michaelian (Eds.) Current Controversies in Philosophy of Memory, pp. 189-205. Routledge. [email for preprint].
Despite many apparently confirmatory results, there is little consensus about whether nonhuman animals have episodic memory. Why is that? I focus on a family of sceptical views I call ‘kind scepticism’. Kind sceptics argue that the evidence doesn’t support the hypothesis that animals have episodic memory, since it fails to rule out that they have a form of memory that, though similar to episodic memory, differs in kind. This raises a difficult question about how to delineate episodic memory as a psychological kind. I suggest that kind sceptics and advocates of nonhuman episodic memory are committed to different answers to this question, and that their disagreement can’t be settled by appealing to the objective structure of the world, but only by appeal to pragmatic considerations.
Reports
The Atlas of Intelligences: A Diverse Intelligences Resource. 2022. (With Kensy Cooperrider, Lucy Cheke, Marta Halina & Stephen Cave. Illustrations by Brenda de Groot.)
A white paper presenting the results of a scoping study investigating the prospects for an 'Atlas of Intelligences' - a new resource collecting and curating cross-disciplinary research on Diverse Intelligences.
Blog Posts
Do Nonhuman Animals Have Episodic Memory? 2020. At Imperfect Cognitions.
Reading Minds & Reading Maps. 2019. At the iCog Blog.
My writing for a wider audience is here.
Journal Articles
Lady parts and baby parts: What is a foetus? In Press. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
A common-sense picture of pregnancy views the foetus as (a) an organism and (b) approximately baby-shaped. This paper draws on metabolic accounts of the organism to argue that (a) and (b) can't both be true: either the foetus is not an organism, or it is much bigger than we tend to think, overlapping considerably with its mother. I draw out consequences for the metaphysics of birth, our nature and persistence, and the ethical dynamics of pregnancy.
How do we know if animals remember? Proximal functions and the distribution of episodic memory. In Press. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. (With Arieh Schwartz).
Assuming episodic memory is not uniquely human, we should expect it to vary across species. This makes it hard to give a principled account of what 'counts' as an episodic memory system: which features are necessary? We argue that the investigation of episodic memory in animals should be guided by an account of its proximal functions: its most basic selected effects. We develop a preliminary account of episodic memory's proximal functions and use this to show that episodic memory is unlikely to be uniquely human.
Episodic memory in animals. 2025. Philosophy Compass 20 (5): e70037. (With Simon Brown).
This paper provides an overview of the debate about episodic memory in animals aimed at a philosophical audience. We review relevant behavioural evidence, as well as neuroscientific and computational evidence which has been less discussed in philosophy. We then distinguish and evaluate reasons for scepticism about episodic memory in animals, and highlight three pressing philosophical problems underlying these sceptical responses.
Why might animals remember? A Functional Framework for Episodic Memory Research in Comparative Psychology. 2025. Learning & Behaviour 53: 14-30. (With Simon Brown).
Behavioural work with animals often requires taking a functional perspective: looking for cognitive capacities in contexts where they serve a biological function. In this review, we survey the functions that have been proposed for episodic memory and develop a framework for theorising about the function of episodic memory in comparative psychological research. We argue that there is scope for further theoretical elaboration of prominent proposals relating episodic memory to food caching and future-oriented cognition, and that learning-related functions suggested by computational models are a fruitful area for future behavioural research.
Elements of Episodic Memory: Insights from Artificial Agents. 2024. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 379: 20230416. (With Andrea Blomkvist).
Many recent AI systems take inspiration from biological episodic memory. We review these episodic-memory-inspired systems, and propose that they could be used to develop and test theories of episodic memory's function. In particular, we suggest that they highlight two pursuit-worthy hypotheses: that episodic memory plays a role in planning that is independent of future-oriented simulation, and that it is adaptive in virtue of its contributions to fast learning in novel, sparse-reward environments.
Disagreement & Classification in Comparative Cognitive Science. 2024. Noûs, 58 (3): 825-847.
Comparative cognitive science often involves asking questions like 'Do nonhumans have C?', where C is a capacity we take humans to have. These questions often give rise to disagreement. In this paper, I argue that understanding these questions in terms of natural kinds helps us understand why these disagreements arise, and how we can diagnose and resolve them.
The Mnemonic Functions of Episodic Memory. 2022. Philosophical Psychology, 35 (3): 327-349.
What is episodic memory for? Discussions of episodic memory's function often highlight its role in imaginative simulation. But in this paper, I emphasise episodic memory's important mnemonic functions. In particular, I argue that it plays a central role in the storage, encoding and retrieval of semantic memory, analogous to the role played by the 'mind palaces' used by memory champions.
Remembering Events & Representing Time. 2021. Synthese, 199: 2505-2524.
It's natural to think there's a tight connection between episodic memory and the possession of temporal concepts. If this were true, it would suggest certain straightforward evidential connections between temporal cognition and episodic memory in nonhuman animals. I argue that matters are more complicated than this. Episodic memory is memory for events and not for the times they occupy, and is dissociable from temporal understanding. This is not to say that episodic memory and temporal cognition are unrelated, but that the relationship between them cannot be straightforwardly captured by claims about necessity and sufficiency.
Replication, Uncertainty and Progress in Comparative Cognition. 2021. Animal Behaviour and Cognition, 8 (2): 296-304.
Replications are often taken to play both epistemic and demarcating roles in science. I argue that in fields characterised by a high degree of theoretical openness and uncertainty, like comparative cognition, replications sit poorly in these roles. Like other experiments conducted under conditions of uncertainty, they are often equivocal and open to interpretation. As such, they're poorly placed to deliver clear judgments about comparative cognition's reliability or scientific bona fides. I suggest that this should encourage a broader view of both the nature of scientific progress and the role of replication in comparative cognition.
The Impure Phenomenology of Episodic Memory. 2020. Mind and Language 35: 641-660.
Episodic memory has a distinctive phenomenology: it involves 'mentally reliving' a past event. It's been suggested that if episodic memory is characterised in terms of this phenomenology, it will be 'impossible to test' for it in animals - because this is to characterise it in terms of its 'purely phenomenal features', which cannot be detected in nonverbal behaviour. I argue that this is a mistake. The phenomenological features of episodic memory are impure phenomenological features, which can be detected in animal behaviour. So, insisting on a phenomenological characterisation of episodic memory does nothing to damage the prospects for detecting it in nonhuman animals.
Conjoined Twinning & Biological Individuation. 2020. Philosophical Studies 177 (8): 2395-2415.
In dicephalus conjoined twinning, it appears that two heads share a body; in cephalopagus, it appears two bodies share a head. How many human animals are present in these cases? One answer is that there are two in both cases: conjoined twins are precisely that, conjoined twins. Another is that the number of human animals is the same as the apparent number of bodies - so, there is one in dicephalus and two in cephalopagus. I show that both answers are incorrect: on prominent accounts of biological individuation, there is a single human animal in both cases. This has a number of consequences for the debate about what we are.
Mapping the Minds of Others. 2019. Review of Philosophy & Psychology 10 (4): 747-767.
Some mindreaders can ascribe representational states to others. I argue that these mindreaders might differ from one another with respect to the format they take representational states to have. Some might take mental states to be linguistic, whilst others might take them to be map-like or to have another format. Since formats differ in their expressive power and formal features, these differences make a significant difference to the range of mental state attributions a mindreader can make. I close by articulating the significance of this for the study of mindreading in the great apes.
Learning from the Past: Epistemic Generativity and the Function of Episodic Memory. 2019. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (5-6): 242-251. Winner of the 2018 Annual Essay Prize of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp.
I argue that the function of episodic memory is to store information about the past, against the currently orthodox view that it is to support imagining the future. I show that episodic memory is epistemically generative, allowing organisms to learn from past events retroactively. This confers adaptive benefits in three domains: reasoning about the world, skill and social interaction. Given the role played by evolutionary perspectives in comparative research, this argument necessitates a radical shift in the study of episodic memory in nonhumans.
Mirror Self-Recognition & Self-Identification. 2018. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 97 (2): 284-303.
Some animals, including the great apes, are capable of mirror self-recognition. This is widely taken to show that they are self-aware - but there is some disagreement about whether the self-awareness in question is psychological or bodily self-awareness. I argue that self-recognition does not involve psychological self-awareness, but involves more than bodily self-awareness: it also involves 'objective self-awareness', the capacity for first-person thoughts which rest on identification, and are thus vulnerable to error through misidentification.
Chapters
Why is there so much disagreement about animal minds? Forthcoming in D. Curry and L. Daost (Eds.) Introducing Philosophy of Mind, Today (Routledge).
Many questions about the minds of animals inspire persistent disagreement among experts. Why is this? In this chapter, I argue that these questions are about whether animals share a certain cognitive capacity with us; the problem is that it is often unclear exactly what it would mean for this to be true, making these questions about which reasonable people can disagree.
Experience Replay Algorithms and the Function of Episodic Memory. 2025. In S. Aronowitz & L. Nadel (Eds.) Space, Time, and Memory. OUP.
Episodic memory has inspired the development of several ‘experience replay’ algorithms in AI. I ask whether such algorithms might shed light on a puzzle about episodic memory’s function: what does episodic memory contribute to the cognitive systems in which it is found? I argue that experience replay algorithms can serve as idealized models of episodic memory for the purposes of addressing this question. Taking the DQN algorithm as a case study, I suggest that these algorithms provide some support for mnemonic accounts, on which episodic memory’s function lies in the storage, encoding and retrieval of information. By extending and adapting experience replay algorithms, we might gain further insight into episodic memory’s operations and contributions to cognition.
Do Animals Have Episodic Memory? Optimism, Kind Scepticism and Pluralism. 2022. In A. Sant'Anna, C. McCarroll & K. Michaelian (Eds.) Current Controversies in Philosophy of Memory, pp. 189-205. Routledge. [email for preprint].
Despite many apparently confirmatory results, there is little consensus about whether nonhuman animals have episodic memory. Why is that? I focus on a family of sceptical views I call ‘kind scepticism’. Kind sceptics argue that the evidence doesn’t support the hypothesis that animals have episodic memory, since it fails to rule out that they have a form of memory that, though similar to episodic memory, differs in kind. This raises a difficult question about how to delineate episodic memory as a psychological kind. I suggest that kind sceptics and advocates of nonhuman episodic memory are committed to different answers to this question, and that their disagreement can’t be settled by appealing to the objective structure of the world, but only by appeal to pragmatic considerations.
Reports
The Atlas of Intelligences: A Diverse Intelligences Resource. 2022. (With Kensy Cooperrider, Lucy Cheke, Marta Halina & Stephen Cave. Illustrations by Brenda de Groot.)
A white paper presenting the results of a scoping study investigating the prospects for an 'Atlas of Intelligences' - a new resource collecting and curating cross-disciplinary research on Diverse Intelligences.
Blog Posts
Do Nonhuman Animals Have Episodic Memory? 2020. At Imperfect Cognitions.
Reading Minds & Reading Maps. 2019. At the iCog Blog.
My writing for a wider audience is here.