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Department of Industrial Engineering & Management | Faculty of Engineering Sciences (Department of Philosophy | Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences) |
The research in our lab combines philosophical and experimental work. The latter kind is based on philosophical questions (primarily, but not only, in epistemology) that are decomposed into smaller, more specific behaviourally testable questions.
Purely philosophical questions include:
- What is the nature of physical computation? How is it conceived in cognitive explanations?
- How are physical computational processes individuated?
- What is the explanatory role of computation in cognitive explanations?
- How should 'information' be understood for it to play its central explanatory role in the cognitive sciences?
- If 'information' is understood functionally (i.e., as being receiver-dependent and playing a functional role), can it be both scientifically legitimate and objective?
- What are the limitations of the ambitious project to explain behaviour, perception, and cognition using the predictive processing framework alone (i.e., the brain as a Bayesian hypothesis tester)?
- In what respects are knowledge-that (roughly, knowledge of facts) and knowledge-how (roughly, procedural knowledge) similar and different?
- Does knowledge-how amount to skillful knowledge?
- What is the relationship between skill acquisition and automaticity?
Current active experimental projects focus on the relation amongst learning, skill acquisition, and automaticity.
- Can cognitive control improve (i.e., become faster and more accurately executed) with practice?
- Does the mere performance of automatic cognitive processes (e.g., reading words or numbers) improve the performance of other cognitively controlled tasks (e.g., classification tasks or inhibition)?
- Is such improvement confined to same-domain processing (reading words -> concept classification) or not (reading numbers -> concept classification)?
- Can the Stroop effect (as a paradigmatic case of automatic processing) be suppressed over time (e.g., after practicing the same task for several weeks)?
- How do automatisation and inhibition interact over time while practicing a particular task?
- How can pupillometry supplement our behavioural paradigms (i.e., those based on reaction time and accuracy) for measuring cognitive load and automatic performance?
Most recent publications:
Fresco, N. and Shagrir, O. (2026). The Challenge of Miscomputation. American Philosophical Quarterly. 63 (3).
Abstract: Explaining miscomputation is often a central desideratum of accounts of physical computation. Our claim is that explaining miscomputation is a non-trivial task. Specifically, mis- computation poses a challenge for norm-based accounts of computation. If the system’s norm is to compute a specific function, in deviating from this function, the system does not comply with the norm, and hence, does not compute at all. If the norm is to compute some (non-specific) function, in computing any function the system complies with the norm; and hence, it computes but does not miscompute. On either horn, norm-based accounts face the problem of explaining miscomputation. We describe and motivate the dilemma and examine some possible strategies for avoiding it.
Arieh Schwartz & Nir Fresco (2025) Mapping content: why cognitive maps are non-conceptual mental states. Synthese. 205 (95)
Abstract. Cognitive maps play a crucial role in mammalian navigation. They provide the organism with information about its own location and the locations of landmarks within known environments. Cognitive maps have yet to receive ample attention in philosophy. In this article, we argue that cognitive maps should not be understood along the lines of conceptual mental states, such as beliefs and desires. They are more plausibly understood to be non-conceptual. We clarify what is at stake in this claim and offer two empirically-informed arguments in its favor. Both arguments submit that cognitive maps are probably non-conceptual because their representational structure seems to differ from that of conceptual mental states.
To enquire about the lab and our active projects, knowledge.lab@post.bgu.ac.il
Contact Information
Nir Fresco
Room 18, Building 93B.
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
P.O.B. 653 Beer-Sheva 8410501 Israel
P: +972-8-6428250
E: nfresco@bgu.ac.il
BlueSky: nirfresco.bsky.social
