Pablo Fernandez Velasco
Biographic Data
| ID | 214528 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pablo Fernandez Velasco |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pablo Fernandez |
| FAMILY NAME | Velasco |
| SIGNATURE | VELASCO P F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7563-8170 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Ecological Grief as a Shared Emotion
There is a growing interdisciplinary effort to understand the emotional dimensions of the climate crisis. A central focus in this line of research is ecological grief—the grief felt in relation to ecological losses. Ecological grief is frequently claimed to be a shared emotion. Here, we discuss whether, and in which way, ecological grief is a shared emotion. We argue that ecological grief is characteristically shared as a group-based emotion. The…
Atmospheres and the Intentionality of Moods
One of the central questions in philosophy of mind concerns the intentionality of moods. While it is standard to take the intentional object of moods as either ‘everything’ or ‘nothing’, neither view seems to be explanatorily inadequate. Given this, this paper develops and motivates a positive account of the intentionality of moods, according to which moods are directed at atmospheres. We first analyze the elusiveness of mood experiences in terms…
Place, Climate Change and the Experience of Loss
Climate change leads to environmental transformations and destruction, which deeply affect individuals and communities living in vulnerable areas. There is a growing literature considering the ethical and political implications of climate change on people's identity and attachment to places. Separately, there is a body of research on the mental health impact of climate change, with many studies focusing on ecological grief—the grief felt in respo…
Metacognitive Feelings
Metacognitive feelings are affective experiences that concern the subject’s mental processes and capacities. Paradigmatic examples include the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of confidence, or the tip-of-the-tongue experience. In this article, we advance an account of metacognitive feelings based on the predictive-processing framework. The core tenet of predictive processing is that the brain is a hierarchical hypothesis-testing mechanism, pr…
Atmospheres and extended feelings
Atmospheres have been the focus of reflection by many phenomenologists, and they have recently gained prominence in work coming from human geography, from performance studies, and from architecture. There are, however, widely differing interpretations of the concept of atmosphere. In particular, it is unclear whether atmospheres are extended feelings. This paper leverages recent advances in cognitive neuroscience to address this question. It empl…
Self‐location in perceptual experience
Perceptual experience is self‐locating. This claim aligns with our intuitions and is the dominant view in philosophy. To defend the claim, some philosophers have advanced perspectival accounts and others have advanced agentive accounts. Here, I explore tensions between the two accounts and propose a novel, integrative account: the top‐down view, which defends that visual experience is self‐locating in virtue of cognitive maps that modulate visual…
London taxi drivers exploit neighbourhood boundaries for hierarchical route planning
Humans show an impressive ability to plan over complex situations and environments. A classic approach to explaining such planning has been tree-search algorithms which search through alternative state sequences for the most efficient path through states. However, this approach fails when the number of states is large due to the time to compute all possible sequences. Hierarchical route planning has been proposed as an alternative, offering a com…
What are atmospheres
This paper advances an analytic philosophical approach to atmospheres. We start by outlining three core characteristics of atmospheres: holism (an atmosphere is a holistic entity that emerges through the combinations of various aspects of the environment), affectivity (atmospheres are grasped corporeally and affectively), and quasi-objectivity (atmospheres cannot be captured in solely objective or solely subjective terms). We look at the most pro…
Ecological grief as a crisis in dwelling
In the current context of widespread environmental collapse, ecological grief—the sense of loss that arises from experiencing environmental destruction—has become a burgeoning topic of inquiry across psychology, geography, and anthropology. The central challenge in the study of ecological grief is that its theoretical foundations remain underdeveloped. Recent discussions in philosophy of emotions elucidate that a central element in this theoretic…
Seen Again
This paper proposes Virtual Reality (VR) and 360 film as promising fieldwork tools for addressing problematic temporalities in ethnographic museums and for collaborating with communities of origin. Focusing on the Maria Czaplicka Siberian collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, we examine how previous methods of display marginalized the Evenki by denying their coevalness. Drawing on research in Evenkia in 2019 (part of the project Wanderin…
Covid-19 and the Politics of Fear
Group navigation and procedural metacognition
There is a remarkable gap in the academic literature when it comes to group navigation, and procedural metacognition in group navigation is an important but virtually unexplored topic. The present paper aims to fill this gap by providing an account of how metacognitive feelings evaluate and regulate group navigational processes. The paper reviews animal studies and ethnographic work to elucidate three exiting processes in human group navigation: …
Social and temporal disorientation during the Covid‐19 pandemic
The societal hallmark of the Covid‐19 pandemic was a set of mitigation measures such as lockdowns and curfews. The cognitive impact on the public of the resulting spatial, social and temporal constraints is still being investigated. While pandemic time has been extensively studied and mostly described as slowed down and elongated, opposite experimental patterns across national and social contexts leave open an important explanatory gap in order t…
Entropy and a sub-group of geometric measures of paths predict the navigability of an environment
Entropy, prediction and the cultural ecosystem of human cognition
Major proponents of both Distributed Cognition and Predictive Processing have argued that the two theoretical frameworks are strongly compatible. An important conjecture supporting the union of the two frameworks is that cultural practices tend to reduce entropy —that is, to increase predictability— at all scales in a cultural cognitive ecosystem. This conjecture connects Distributed Cognition with Predictive Processing because it shows how cultu…
What is it (like) to imagine an emotion
What does it mean to imagine an emotion? The present article introduces a typology of three different ways in which it is possible to imagine emotion. This typology allows to individuate a form of imagining emotion that has been underexplored: emotion-like imagination. Emotion-like imagination, rather than being a way of merely imagining that a certain emotional experience occurs or a form of responding emotionally to imagined representations, re…
Lost in pandemic time
People have experienced many forms of temporal disorientation during the Covid-19 crisis. For this study, we collected a rich corpus of reports on the multifaceted experiences of disorientation during the pandemic. In this paper, we study the resulting corpus using a descriptive approach. We identify six emerging themes: temporal rift; temporal vertigo; impoverished time; tunnel vision; spatial and social scaffolding of time; suspended time. We o…
A Unified Theory of Disorientation
Une théorie unifiée de la désorientation Il existe un grand nombre d'études sur la désorientation spatiale, allant de la géographie aux neurosciences, mais il n'existe pas de compréhension unifiée du phénomène. En réponse à cette hétérogénéité, la présente thèse de doctorat propose une théorie unifiée de la désorientation spatiale. La désorientation est, au fond, un phénomène subjectif, et c'est en accordant une attention appropriée à ses aspects…
Affective experience in the predictive mind
The collective disorientation of the Covid-19 crisis
One of the chief features of this global crisis is that we find ourselves in a shifting landscape. The resulting disorientation extends beyond health research and into many domains of our individual and collective lives. We suffer from political disorientation (the need for a radical shift in economic thinking), from social disorientation (the rearrangement of social dynamics based on distancing measures), and from temporal disorientation (the wa…
Disorientation and self-consciousness
The present paper explores the phenomenology of disorientation and its relationship with self-consciousness. Section 1 discusses previous literature on the links between self-location and self-consciousness and proposes a distinction between minimal self-location (which requires only an ego-centric frame of reference) and integrated self-location (which requires the integration of egocentric and allocentric frames of reference). The double aim of…
Disorientation and GIS-Informed Wilderness Search and Rescue
The collective disorientation of the Covid-19 crisis
One of the chief features of this global crisis is that we find ourselves in a shifting landscape. The resulting disorientation extends beyond health research and into many domains of our individual and collective lives. We suffer from political disorientation (the need for a radical shift in economic thinking), from social disorientation (the rearrangement of social dynamics based on distancing measures), and from temporal disorientation (the wa…
Ecological grief as a crisis in dwelling
In the current context of widespread environmental collapse, ecological grief—the sense of loss that arises from experiencing environmental destruction—has become a burgeoning topic of inquiry across psychology, geography, and anthropology. The central challenge in the study of ecological grief is that its theoretical foundations remain underdeveloped. Recent discussions in philosophy of emotions elucidate that a central element in this theoretic…
Seen Again
This paper proposes Virtual Reality (VR) and 360 film as promising fieldwork tools for addressing problematic temporalities in ethnographic museums and for collaborating with communities of origin. Focusing on the Maria Czaplicka Siberian collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, we examine how previous methods of display marginalized the Evenki by denying their coevalness. Drawing on research in Evenkia in 2019 (part of the project Wanderin…
Disorientation and GIS-Informed Wilderness Search and Rescue
Disorientation and self-consciousness
The present paper explores the phenomenology of disorientation and its relationship with self-consciousness. Section 1 discusses previous literature on the links between self-location and self-consciousness and proposes a distinction between minimal self-location (which requires only an ego-centric frame of reference) and integrated self-location (which requires the integration of egocentric and allocentric frames of reference). The double aim of…
A Unified Theory of Disorientation
Une théorie unifiée de la désorientation Il existe un grand nombre d'études sur la désorientation spatiale, allant de la géographie aux neurosciences, mais il n'existe pas de compréhension unifiée du phénomène. En réponse à cette hétérogénéité, la présente thèse de doctorat propose une théorie unifiée de la désorientation spatiale. La désorientation est, au fond, un phénomène subjectif, et c'est en accordant une attention appropriée à ses aspects…
Affective experience in the predictive mind
The collective disorientation of the Covid-19 crisis
One of the chief features of this global crisis is that we find ourselves in a shifting landscape. The resulting disorientation extends beyond health research and into many domains of our individual and collective lives. We suffer from political disorientation (the need for a radical shift in economic thinking), from social disorientation (the rearrangement of social dynamics based on distancing measures), and from temporal disorientation (the wa…
What is it (like) to imagine an emotion
What does it mean to imagine an emotion? The present article introduces a typology of three different ways in which it is possible to imagine emotion. This typology allows to individuate a form of imagining emotion that has been underexplored: emotion-like imagination. Emotion-like imagination, rather than being a way of merely imagining that a certain emotional experience occurs or a form of responding emotionally to imagined representations, re…
Lost in pandemic time
People have experienced many forms of temporal disorientation during the Covid-19 crisis. For this study, we collected a rich corpus of reports on the multifaceted experiences of disorientation during the pandemic. In this paper, we study the resulting corpus using a descriptive approach. We identify six emerging themes: temporal rift; temporal vertigo; impoverished time; tunnel vision; spatial and social scaffolding of time; suspended time. We o…
Entropy and a sub-group of geometric measures of paths predict the navigability of an environment
Entropy, prediction and the cultural ecosystem of human cognition
Major proponents of both Distributed Cognition and Predictive Processing have argued that the two theoretical frameworks are strongly compatible. An important conjecture supporting the union of the two frameworks is that cultural practices tend to reduce entropy —that is, to increase predictability— at all scales in a cultural cognitive ecosystem. This conjecture connects Distributed Cognition with Predictive Processing because it shows how cultu…
Covid-19 and the Politics of Fear
Group navigation and procedural metacognition
There is a remarkable gap in the academic literature when it comes to group navigation, and procedural metacognition in group navigation is an important but virtually unexplored topic. The present paper aims to fill this gap by providing an account of how metacognitive feelings evaluate and regulate group navigational processes. The paper reviews animal studies and ethnographic work to elucidate three exiting processes in human group navigation: …
Social and temporal disorientation during the Covid‐19 pandemic
The societal hallmark of the Covid‐19 pandemic was a set of mitigation measures such as lockdowns and curfews. The cognitive impact on the public of the resulting spatial, social and temporal constraints is still being investigated. While pandemic time has been extensively studied and mostly described as slowed down and elongated, opposite experimental patterns across national and social contexts leave open an important explanatory gap in order t…
Metacognitive Feelings
Metacognitive feelings are affective experiences that concern the subject’s mental processes and capacities. Paradigmatic examples include the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of confidence, or the tip-of-the-tongue experience. In this article, we advance an account of metacognitive feelings based on the predictive-processing framework. The core tenet of predictive processing is that the brain is a hierarchical hypothesis-testing mechanism, pr…
Atmospheres and extended feelings
Atmospheres have been the focus of reflection by many phenomenologists, and they have recently gained prominence in work coming from human geography, from performance studies, and from architecture. There are, however, widely differing interpretations of the concept of atmosphere. In particular, it is unclear whether atmospheres are extended feelings. This paper leverages recent advances in cognitive neuroscience to address this question. It empl…
Self‐location in perceptual experience
Perceptual experience is self‐locating. This claim aligns with our intuitions and is the dominant view in philosophy. To defend the claim, some philosophers have advanced perspectival accounts and others have advanced agentive accounts. Here, I explore tensions between the two accounts and propose a novel, integrative account: the top‐down view, which defends that visual experience is self‐locating in virtue of cognitive maps that modulate visual…
London taxi drivers exploit neighbourhood boundaries for hierarchical route planning
Humans show an impressive ability to plan over complex situations and environments. A classic approach to explaining such planning has been tree-search algorithms which search through alternative state sequences for the most efficient path through states. However, this approach fails when the number of states is large due to the time to compute all possible sequences. Hierarchical route planning has been proposed as an alternative, offering a com…
What are atmospheres
This paper advances an analytic philosophical approach to atmospheres. We start by outlining three core characteristics of atmospheres: holism (an atmosphere is a holistic entity that emerges through the combinations of various aspects of the environment), affectivity (atmospheres are grasped corporeally and affectively), and quasi-objectivity (atmospheres cannot be captured in solely objective or solely subjective terms). We look at the most pro…
Ecological grief as a crisis in dwelling
In the current context of widespread environmental collapse, ecological grief—the sense of loss that arises from experiencing environmental destruction—has become a burgeoning topic of inquiry across psychology, geography, and anthropology. The central challenge in the study of ecological grief is that its theoretical foundations remain underdeveloped. Recent discussions in philosophy of emotions elucidate that a central element in this theoretic…
Seen Again
This paper proposes Virtual Reality (VR) and 360 film as promising fieldwork tools for addressing problematic temporalities in ethnographic museums and for collaborating with communities of origin. Focusing on the Maria Czaplicka Siberian collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, we examine how previous methods of display marginalized the Evenki by denying their coevalness. Drawing on research in Evenkia in 2019 (part of the project Wanderin…
Ecological Grief as a Shared Emotion
There is a growing interdisciplinary effort to understand the emotional dimensions of the climate crisis. A central focus in this line of research is ecological grief—the grief felt in relation to ecological losses. Ecological grief is frequently claimed to be a shared emotion. Here, we discuss whether, and in which way, ecological grief is a shared emotion. We argue that ecological grief is characteristically shared as a group-based emotion. The…
Atmospheres and the Intentionality of Moods
One of the central questions in philosophy of mind concerns the intentionality of moods. While it is standard to take the intentional object of moods as either ‘everything’ or ‘nothing’, neither view seems to be explanatorily inadequate. Given this, this paper develops and motivates a positive account of the intentionality of moods, according to which moods are directed at atmospheres. We first analyze the elusiveness of mood experiences in terms…
Place, Climate Change and the Experience of Loss
Climate change leads to environmental transformations and destruction, which deeply affect individuals and communities living in vulnerable areas. There is a growing literature considering the ethical and political implications of climate change on people's identity and attachment to places. Separately, there is a body of research on the mental health impact of climate change, with many studies focusing on ecological grief—the grief felt in respo…
Psychology (13 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works) · Cognition (6 works) · Embodied and Extended Cognition (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Cognitive science (5 works) · Feeling (5 works)