
PABLO FERNANDEZ VELASCO
Philosopher | Cognitive Scientist

I am a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Philosophy of the University of York, and an affiliated member at the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience of University College London. I work on philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and a big aspect of my research lies in interdisciplinary collaboration. I see philosophy both as a way of advancing interdisciplinary work through the development of solid theoretical foundations, and as a way of connecting scientific advances to pressing social issues.
I am particularly interested in spatial cognition, environmental experience, and the role that affective processes play in evaluating and regulating cognition. I explore all of these themes in collaboration with researchers across neuroscience, computer science, psychology, geography, anthropology and architecture. This interdisciplinary ethos is reflected in the diverse methodologies involved in my work, which span phenomenology, cognitive ethnography, brain imaging, gamified experiments, survey instruments and thematic analysis. For my British Academy project, I will be exploring ecological grief, the sense of loss that arises from experiencing environmental destruction. The plan is to combine phenomenological methods with recent advances in the cognitive sciences to develop an integrative theory of ecological grief that serves as the basis of future interdisciplinary research into the psychological effects of environmental destruction.
I completed my doctoral work at the Institut Jean Nicod of Ecole Normale Superieure in 2021. Since then, I have published academic articles in top journals across a variety of disciplines, and my work has received media attention in venues including BBC, The Guardian, El País, Le Monde, Irish Times, and New Scientist. In 2022, I was the runner-up of the Annual Essay Prize from the International Society for Social Ontology, and in 2021 I was awarded the Annual Essay Prize from the Centre for Philosophical Psychology.
PUBLICATIONS
Below are only my first author publications (including joint first authorship). For an automatically updated list of publications, see my Scholar Profile
2025
Expert Navigators Deploy Rational Complexity-Based Decision Prioritization for Large-Scale Real-World Planning PNAS
2024
Wayfinding across ocean and tundra: what traditional cultures teach us about navigation Trends in Cognitive Science
Metacognitive Feelings: A Predictive Processing Perspective Perspectives on Psychological Science
Self‐location in perceptual experience: A top‐down account Mind & Language
Ecological Grief as a Crisis in Dwelling European Journal of Philosophy
London taxi drivers exploit neighbourhood boundaries for hierarchical route planning Cognition
Social and temporal disorientation during the Covid‐19 pandemic: An analysis of 3306 responses to a quantitative questionnaire British Journal of Psychology
Wayfinding and environmental experience: an analysis of the navigational culture of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters Journal of Navigation
2023
No link between handedness and spatial navigation: Evidence from over 400,000 participants in 41 countries Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Entropy, prediction and the cultural ecosystem of human cognition: A challenge to the integration of Distributed Cognition and Predictive Processing Synthese
Entropy and a Sub-Group of Geometric Measures of Paths Predict the Navigability of an Environment Cognition
Social reality without language: enacted representations and institutions in a more-than-human world Journal of Social Ontology
The cognitive advantages of the notebook Cognitive Semiotics
2022
Experiencing a slow passage of time was an indicator of social and temporal disorientation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Scientific Reports
Development and validation of a quantitative instrument for measuring temporal and social disorientation in the Covid-19 crisis PLOS ONE
Group navigation and procedural metacognition Philosophical Psychology
Lost in pandemic time: A phenomenological analysis of temporal disorientation during the Covid-19 crisis Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
What is it (like) to imagine an emotion? Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Come Closer, Famous Odysseus: A Distributed Account of Moral Responsibility Teorema
2021
Affective experience in the predictive mind: a review and new integrative account Synthese
The collective disorientation of the COVID-19 crisis. Global Discourse: An interdisciplinary journal of current affairs
Making and breaking our shared world: a phenomenological analysis The politics of emotional shockwaves. Palgrave Macmillan.
2020
Subjective disorientation as a metacognitive feeling Spatial cognition & computation
The many faces of disorientation: a response to Daniel R. Montello Spatial cognition & computation
Disorientation and self-consciousness: a phenomenological inquiry Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences
2019
Disorientation and GIS-informed wilderness search and rescue. The Philosophy of GIS. Springer
2017
Attention in the Predictive Processing framework and the phenomenology of Zen meditation Journal of Consciousness Studies