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PABLO FERNANDEZ VELASCO

Philosopher | Cognitive Scientist

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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

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