Academic

Interests

I’m broadly interested in how minds work, particularly in aspects pertaining to consciousness, the self, core cognition, executive function, emotion, language, as well as how it helps us understand the opportunities and risks posed by advanced AI systems.

I primarily work on theory (philosophical/computational), but am more than happy to collaborate with experimentalists.

In addition to studying humans, my empirical work has mostly focused on translating well-established frameworks for studying human cognition to the study of multi-modal language models, which I think are the most promising current candidates for human-level AI.
I am fortunate to pursue this line of inquiry along with many amazing researchers as a co-lead at the open-source collaboration GrowAI.

Recent/Ongoing Projects

In Machine Learning:

“Growing AI Like A Child” (co-lead w/ Yijiang Li and Hokin Deng)
Website: https://growing-ai-like-a-child.github.io/
An open-source projects in which we aim to evaluate and develop better multi-modal language models that are capable to learn and think like humans by grounding their reasoning in foundational cognitive structures.

Our first main paper, “Core Knowledge Deficits in Multi-Modal Language Models” (ICML 2025), demonstrated that current foundation models do not ground their reasoning in basic understanding of object, number, action space, and social relations, which is understood as the “developmental startup software” in humans. We hypothesize that this deficit may account for their lack of robustness in real-world scenarios.

We also conducted focused analyses on how the models’ performance on specific subsections of the benchmark provides insight on particular domains of their functional profiles. This includes theory-of-mind, physical transformation, mechanical reasoning, and perceptual constancy. We have also devised concept hacking, a general method for assessing shortcut-taking behaviors in cognitive-inspired benchmarking.

In theoretical cognitive science

“Perceptual metacognition, memory, and self-consciousness” (w/ Dorian Liu)
Draft presented at MoC5, ASSC27, and SPAN 2025
We explore the hypothesis that both “pre-reflective” (e.g. sense of ownership) and “reflective” (e.g. introspection) types of self-consciousness rely on a generic perceptual metacognitive process while differentiated by mnemonic contents in terms of their phenomenal characters.
“Hedonic reversals as a case against the emotional unconscious”
Draft presented at ASSC26
I examine how hedonic reversal, the phenomenon of taking pleasure from experiences that are usually aversive – such as the fear from watching horror movies or the pain from consuming chili peppers – inform us about the nature of emotion. I argue that it presents an elegant case of support for the ambitious higher-order theories of emotions by showing that the subjective nature of emotional valence must be understood in terms of conceptual self-processing.
“Mind uploading: a techno-philosophical analysis” (w/ Dorian Liu)
Draft presented at ASSC28, ISPSM2 and Weinberg Symposium’24 @UMich
We outline the lean technical conditions that would enable someone to survive as themselves after mind uploading, concluding that it takes a strong kind of computational functionalism which, despite its hard restrains, has yet been falsified by empirical evidence.

In psychophysics

As a research assistant of U-M’s Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab led by Prof. John Jonides, I’ve been developing a new method to probe the domain-generality of cognitive control
Draft presented at OPAM32
At UCL’s MetaLab led by Prof. Steve Fleming, I’ve been involved in a project led by Dr. Benjy Barnett exploring how people process zero

Trainings

I’m quite keen on going to summer/winter schools (def. not for meeting new people and going to new places and trying new foods). I’ve been at:

Other involvements

In respect to academic societies, I’m

student member of CogSci, ASSC, LSA, SAS, the Psychonomic Society, and associated member of AMCS
international representative for ULAB
first-year representative for EULingSoc
and the founding president of the linguistics society at BNDS, which is very much my proudest accomplishment to date

I regularly work for X Academy, a multidisciplinary educational program happening every summer in China, where I’ve been hosting the Cognitive Neuroscience course. I’m glad to have assisted the teaching of

Prof. Xiao Xiao and Prof. Miao Cao
Prof. Xiao Xiao (2023)
Prof. Ji Hu (2022)

Additionally, I was an active Linguistics Olympiad contestant and have been hanging around in the community doing organizational & educational stuff. I

volunteered to host the 2023 UKLO national training camp & marked some papers
built a problem database for the organizing committee of CNOL
and look forward to volunteer for NACLO at U-M in the coming years

Resources

I compiled some reading lists for

both are primarily for folks with intro-level backgrounds in psychology/philosophy/computer science & wish to get into respective topics.

For more general audiences, I recommend

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

Contact

Please feel free to reach me at ihzedoul [at] umich [dot] edu : D