I'm a Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. I carry out research in philosophy and philosophy-inspired cognitive science in Chaz Firestone's Lab in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. 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 was born and raised.

I study the subjective character of the mind with an interdisciplinary approach. I use tools from philosophy, psychology and neuroscience to further our understanding of 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 kid, and also walking around with my camera.

research

The goal of my research program is to further our understanding of 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 tools from 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 and neural processes that support metacognition.

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 substrates of 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 ethical challenges posed by novel neuroimaging technologies to how social stereotypes affect how we perceive—and potentially treat—others.

preprints

• Morales, J. & Lau, H. (2020) Confidence tracks Consciousness.
• Forthcoming as a book chapter in Qualitative Consciousness: Themes from the Philosophy of David Rosenthal (Ed. Josh Weisberg), Cambridge University Press.
• Maniscalco, B., Graham Castaneda, O., Odegaard, B., Morales, J., Rajananda, S. & Peters, M. (2020) The Metaperceptual Function: Exploring Dissociations Between Confidence and Task Performance with Type 2 Psychometric Curves. PsyArXiv. doi:10.31234/osf.io/5qrjn
• Morales, J., Odegaard, B. & Maniscalco, B. (2019) The Neural Substrates of Conscious Perception without Performance Confound. PsyArXiv. doi:10.31234/osf.io/8zhy3
• Forthcoming as a book chapter in Anthology in Neuroscience and Philosophy (Eds. Felipe De Brigard & Walter Sinnott- Armstrong), MIT Press.

articles

• Morales, J., Bax, A., & Firestone, C. (2020). Sustained Representation of Perspectival Shape. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 (26): 14873-14882.    journal • pdf • data • demos
• 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. (2020). Minority Reports: Consciousness and the Prefrontal Cortex. Mind & Language 35: 493-513.
• This paper was featured in the Brains Blog's Mind & Language Symposium on December 2019 with commentaries by Professors 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.
• Morales, J. (2011). Animal Reasoning: Negation and Representations of Absence. Revista Argentina de Ciencias del Comportamiento, 3(1): 20–33.

book chapters

• Morales, J. & Lau, H. (2020). The Neural Correlates of Consciousness. In Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness (Ed. U. Kriegel), Oxford University Press, 233-260.

work in progress

• Introspection Is Signal Detection *under review
• Social Stereotypes Impair Recognition of Incidental Visual Features (with Austin Baker & Chaz Firestone) *under review
• Mental Strength: The Degrees of Conscious Experience *under review
• Decoding Fear: Philosophical Challenges for Decoded Neurofeedback
• Seeing What’s Not There: The Perception of Absences
• When the Brain Goes Haywire: Anti-Bayesian Updating in Perception (with Steven Gross and Chaz Firestone), in Expected Experiences: The Predictive Mind in an Uncertain World, Tony Cheng and Jakob Howhy (Eds.). (commissioned)
• Confidence & Action Initiation: An fMRI project (with Brian Maniscalco, Olenka Castaneda Graham, Brian Odegaard & Megan Peters)

art & media

London-based artist Cathryn Shilling took the stimuli and fMRI images from our Journal of Neuroscience metacognition paper and created a splendid art installation called Metacognition in Glass.

“Embedding the experimental materials in glass embodies the notion that the brain’s machinery for self-reflection provides us with a distant, sometimes opaque view of ourselves.”

Selection of some magazines, newspapers, news websites, blogs and podcasts where my research has been recently featured: