Research interests

I am still young and developing research interests. My aim like many in cognitive science is to look for universal structures of the mind that can be drawn out. I consider myself to largely be a phenomenologist, who stresses stronger on invariant structures of a phenonemenon rather than only first person subjective experience . I am broadly interested in visual perception, attention and consciousness research. For my PhD thesis I am aiming to sketch out a framework where timing of cognition and temporal consciousness can co-exist and inform each other. My plan is to devise said framework and back it up with empirical support.

Apart from the work that I have done and am doing as part of my thesis, I hold interests in decision making, sense of agency, sub-vocal speech and imagery. At some point in the future, I wish to work on these topics.

Time & Consciousness

Here, I am interested in linking timing of experiences with experiences in time. Specifically, in connecting how we perceive time and how our mental processes operate over time. The idea here is to bring together philosophy of time consciousness, time perception and timing of cognition under one common understanding of 'mental time'. If this is possible, it would give us a scaffolding to build theories of conscious experience. We would be able to describe, test and model how experiences change over time, and how experiences are altered in time. Towards this aim, I have fleshed out a theoretical model and am currently empirically testing its a assumptions and predictions.

Part one of this project was to combine different conceptions of time-consciousness in philosophy. Each conception captures a unique property of our experience. We proposed how they can co-exist hierarchically, evolving over different timescales in tandem.


The second feature of the same framework is the ability to bring together findings of time perception and timing of cognitive processes that necessarily occur over specific timescales. This allows us to extract a systematic temporal regularity both in and of our experiences.


The idea of 'temporal regularities' allows us to also bring in ideas from oscillation based theories of the brain. Herein, we can postulate three different levels of oscillatory mechanisms, each representing a unique timescale and phenomenlogical feature of experience (as developed above). Then, through a multiplexing metaphor, we can begin to speculate interactions between these three levels to show how one may constrain the evolution of the other. A starting point to these interactions would be via phase, frequency and amplitude modulation/coupling.


Time perception & Consciousness

How is that we can tell that time has passed? Over the last hundred years or so, scientific explanations of how we perceive time have assigned our ability to tell time to clocks in brains, skeleto-musculature, body temperature, complexity of stimuli, ability to pay attention and so on. However, the study of time perception has largerly ignored the temporal regularities we discussed above. The idea that perceived time is a function of what we consciously experience either seems tautological, untestable, trivial or untrue to most. To contcretize the framework briefly introduced above, and to bring back consciousness in the study of time perception, we are conducting several empirical studies. One of these which is now published shows that felt time contracts with perceptual switches. This study was done with a Necker cube. This is a bistable image which when viewed can be seen in two interpretations, i.e. facing upwards or downwards. This image alternates in its perceptual interpretation. These alternations seem instantaneous, as if this image switched immediately. However, it takes sometime for our perceptual systems to realize the different percept of this image. We hypothesized that if people keep track of time via our experiences (and through internal brain clocks) then they would think intervals with these perceptual switches lasted for smaller durations than intervals without perceptual switches. That is, time is only registered for moments we consciously perceive.