Ben Falandays
cognitive scientist & complex-systems researcher

Research
I study cognition as a complex system, involving many processes interacting within and across scales of biological organization. My work focuses on integrating theories of neuroscience, perception/action, development, social coordination, language, culture and evolution to figure out how it all fits together. To do so, I build and analyze computational models in the tradition of artificial life research, which incorporate (proposed) mechanisms at multiple scales. I also do experimental research with human participants, often using virtual reality, motion-capture, and eye-tracking techniques to study the dynamics of perception/action, language processing, and social coordination. Most of my work is guided (though not always explicitly) by questions in philosophy of mind, especially related to mental representation, the mind-body problem, symbol-grounding, and consciousness.

Academic Bio
I'm an assistant professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University, associated with the Cognition, Behavior, and Information group. Previously, I worked as a postdoc in the Virtual Environment Navigation lab of Bill Warren at Brown University. I got my PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences from the University of California--Merced, where I worked primarily with Michael Spivey, Paul Smaldino, and Jeff Yoshimi. Before that, I earned a MS in Psychology from Villanova University, where I worked in Joe Toscano's Word-Recognition & Auditory Processing lab. And I got my BA in Psychology and Philosophy (with a concentration in Eastern philosophy) from University of Delaware.

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