I'm a Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where I'm the resident philosopher in Chaz Firestone's Lab. Before coming to Hopkins, I did a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Columbia University. Before that, I got a B.A. and an M.A. in Mexico City, where I'm from.

I study the subjective character of the mind with an interdisciplinary approach. I use the tools of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience to understand conscious experiences: what they are, what they are about, and how we know about them.

When not doing philosophy or science, I enjoy spending time with my wife and friends, and also walking around with my camera.

research

The goal of my research program is to understand the subjective character of the mind. In particular, I study the cognitive architecture, the neural implementation and the mental properties that make subjectivity possible. To this end, I have three complementary lines of interdisciplinary research where I integrate the tools of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.

First, I study how subjectivity affects what we experience. I focus on the subjective features that imbue our perceptual states—let these be cognitive (e.g. Bayesian updating), perceptual (e.g. perspective), or social (e.g. stereotypes).

Second, I aim to understand the computational and neural mechanisms that govern what we take ourselves to be experiencing. Thus, I study how to better calibrate introspection and how to model the decision-making processes as well as the neural architecture that make metacognition possible.

Third, I study the nature and neural basis of subjectivity. I thus focus, on one hand, on the nature and functions of consciousness and, on the other hand, on interpreting and improving existing experimental paradigms that probe the neural architecture that supports subjective states such as confidence and conscious awareness.

Importantly, asking fundamental questions about the subjective character of the mind invites me, and in fact forces me, to branch out into other areas such as general philosophy of science as well as moral and social philosophy, broadly construed: from the neural basis of voluntary action and the risks posed by new neuroimaging technologies to how social stereotypes affect how we perceive—and potentially treat—others.

articles

• Phillips, I. & MORALES, J. (2020) The Fundamental Problem with No-Cognition Paradigms. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(3): 165-167.
• This is a response to a paper by Ned Block. You can find Ned's original article here and his response to us, "Finessing the bored monkey problem," here.
• Michel, M. & MORALES, J. (2019). Minority Reports: Consciousness and the Prefrontal Cortex. Mind & Language.
• This paper was featured in the Brains Blog's Mind & Language Symposium on December 2019 with commentaries by Liz Irvine, Benji Kozuch, and Michael Pitts & Kevin Ortego, and our response.
• MORALES, J., Lau, H., & Fleming, S. (2018) Domain-general and Domain-specific Patterns of Activity Support Metacognition in Human Prefrontal Cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience, 38(14): 3534-3546.
• MORALES, J., Mouradi Y., Sergent C., Block N., Taschereau-Dumouchel, V., Rosenthal,D., Grimaldi, P. & Lau, H. (2017) Measuring Away an Attentional Confound? Neuroscience of Consciousness, 3(1): 1-3.
• MORALES, J., Chiang, J., & Lau, H. (2015) Controlling for Performance Capacity Confounds in Neuroimaging Studies of Conscious Awareness. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 1(1): 1-11.
• MORALES, J., Solovey, G., Maniscalco, B., Rahnev, D., de Lange, F. P., & Lau, H. (2015) Low Attention Impairs Optimal Incorporation of Prior Knowledge in Perceptual Decisions. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 77(6): 2021–2036.

book chapters

• MORALES, J., Odegaard, B. & Maniscalco, B. (Forthcoming). The Neural Substrates of Conscious Perception without Performance Confounds. In de Brigard & Sinnott-Armstrong (Eds.) Antology of Philosophy and Neuroscience. MIT Press.
• MORALES, J. & Lau, H. (Forthcoming). The Neural Correlates of Consciousness. In Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness (Ed. U. Kriegel), Oxford University Press.

work in progress

• Introspection Is Signal Detection *under review
• Social Stereotypes Impair Recognition of Incidental Visual Features (with Austin Baker & Chaz Firestone) *under review
• Seeing What’s Not There: The Perception of Absences
• Mental Strength: The Degrees of Conscious Experience
• Uncertainty Tracks Subjectivity (with Hakwan Lau), for Qualitative Consciousness: Themes from the Philosophy of David Rosenthal (Ed. Josh Weisberg), Cambridge University Press (under contract).
• The Functions of Consciousness: On the Initiation of Action (with Brian Maniscalco, Brian Odegaard & Megan Peters)
• Decoding Fear: Advances in Decoded Neurofeedback & Challenges for the Philosopher and the Clinical Psychologist