My research is in interdisciplinary philosophy of mind and cognition. I work closely with cognitive scientists and I have published widely on extended, embodied and distributed cognition, neural plasticity, symbolic cognition – particularly reading and mathematical cognition, the cultural evolution of social cognition pragmatism and cognitive science and embodied narratives and the self. I am currently completing a new book on the enculturated mind. I have been Professor of Philosophy since 2018, I was Head of department between 2018 and 2023. Between 2014 and 2018 I was an ARC Future Fellow at Macquarie University Sydney and between 2011 and 2014 I was a senior research fellow in the ARC centre of excellence in cognition and its disorders. I read for a BA in philosophy at the University of Ulster, an MSc in Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham and then a PhD in philosophy at King's College London. I have taught philosophy at the University of Kent, Birkbeck College Faculty of Continuing Education and as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and then at the University of Wollongong.

Philosophy of Mind – mental representations, the self.

Philosophy of Cognitive Science – Social cognition, symbolic cognition (maths, reading and writing), predicitve coding, 4E cognition, cognitive integration.

Philosophy of Biology - The extended synthesis and the evolution of cognition.

Pragmatism - especially C.S. Peirce.

Aesthetics - the evolution of art and art experience.

Virtue theory as it applies to both ethical and cognitive aspects of the individual.