Joan Danielle Ongchoco

Beyond continuous dimensions of space and time, so much of what we actually experience are discrete individuals — objects (in space) and events (in time). My research program demonstrates how these sorts of discrete representations have profound consequences for our mental lives — influencing the perception of many other properties (including time, and number) and the operation of many other mental processes (including attention, memory, and even higher-level decision-making). I explore such themes in two contexts. First, my work has characterized the widely underappreciated phenomenon of what I call scaffolded attention — demonstrating how we can experience ‘everyday hallucinations’ of discrete objects and events from regular patterns (such as a grid, or a ticking metronome) — and we have since been connecting this to clinical and religious hallucinations. Second, I have shown how low-level processes of event segmentation have surprisingly powerful downstream consequences for many aspects of seeing and thinking — changing how we perceive and remember other properties (such as time and number), altering how we make decisions (even eliminating well-known judgmental biases such as anchoring), and potentially contributing to various clinical symptoms (such as paranoia).