About Me

Hello, my name is Sebastian and I’m a PhD student in cognitive psychology at Princeton University. I work in Tania Lombrozo’s Concepts and Cognition Lab.

Broadly, I am interested in the intersection of cognitive science, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. For instance, how do people intuitively compare theories that share the same evidence but differ in their theoretical virtues (e.g., simplicity or ad hocness)? What are our folk beliefs about consciousness, and how do they influence our proclivity toward dualistic thinking? What are the evolutionary origins of religious belief, and how does our cognition treat religious belief differently from scientific belief?

My current research focuses on a classic question in the philosophy of science: is there some advantage to being able to predict data ahead of time, as opposed to accommodating it into a theory after the fact? On the one hand, philosophers and scientists have historically thought there is something ad hoc about accommodation. On the other hand, why would the order in which you learn that data obtained matter to the reliability of a theory? We investigate this question empirically by examining how people who learn using these two strategies differ.