Research

Julien’s work on language is for the most part conceptual. He is interested in questions pertaining to the architecture of the language faculty, its relationship to other cognitive systems, and the role played by language as an expression of human thought and reason. This work is being conducted in the context of Julien’s new book on human intelligence, and it integrates ideas and conclusions from linguistic theory, philosophy, comparative cognition, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Julien’s earlier work on language was experimental and developmental, focusing on the preschool period (roughly 4 and 5-year-old children) and questions at the interface between form and meaning.

Work on agency is both diverse and fundamental in cognitive science. From the perspective of the self, a perennial question asks about the nature and origin of the Sense of Agency (SoA); the experience of control over ourselves and our environment (often related to the question of free will). Julien and some of his collaborators have been investigating SoA using both explicit and implicit measures, such as theTemporal Binding paradigm. Looking beyond the self, important questions arise as to when, and under what conditions, we ascribe agency (roughly speaking, a mental life) to other entities in the world. Recent developments in cognitive science suggest that, perhaps because agents are of unique evolutionary significance, our cognitive systems are particularly fine-tuned to detecting, recognizing, paying attention to, talking about, and remembering agents. In the domain of memory, an “animacy effect” has recently been reported whereby animates/agents have been shown to be better remembered than non-agents. This is a question that Julien and his team have also begun to explore.

Religious thought and behavior are quintessential human traits, present in all modern cultures, found throughout history, and evident in archeology from most periods of human pre-history. Today, religion represents one of the most ubiquitous forces shaping people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. It would indeed be difficult to make sense of most of human existence, including culture, politics, law, morality, and war, without an appreciation of what religion is and how it works. Within the last few decades, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, and neuroscientists working under the banner of what has come to be called The Cognitive Science of Religion have joined forces in an effort to try to understand how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts and practices. Julien and his collaborators have been studying the memorability of supernatural concepts (e.g., gods, souls, spirits) and have proposed and empirically tested a new model of the cognitive mechanisms underlying this memory effect. A few years ago, Julien developed a new undergraduate course called The Religious Mind which explores these fascinating questions.

Beliefs play a central role in our lives: they lie at the heart of what makes us human, they define the boundaries of our cultures, and guide our motivation and behavior. Beliefs also have the extraordinary power to unite and divide people. Today, this observation is perhaps more relevant than ever before. Despite their fundamental importance, however, beliefs have yet to receive a uniform treatment. Indeed, beliefs have been studied across a number of disciplines (e.g., philosophy, theology, sociology, psychology, economics, political science) leading to disparate results and to literatures that do not make contact with each other. This state of affairs calls for a systematic effort to integrate hitherto disconnected lines of research into a single, coherent framework. This new approach is what Julien and his collaborators call The Cognitive Science of Belief. It represents a systematic, collaborative, and interdisciplinary program of research anchored in the various disciplines that make up the sciences of the mind. Within this framework, Julien asks three fundamental questions: (1) where do beliefs come from (2) How are beliefs updated, and (3) what are the broader societal implications of our beliefs.

Julien’s work on the scientific imagine of persons stems from ideas he developed in his 2015 book The Soul Fallacy. Although the scientific view of personhood departs radically from traditional conceptions (e.g., religious or intuitive ones), Julien showed that a coherent, meaningful, and sensitive appreciation of what it means to be human remains intact once people are demythologized. In a sense, adopting a scientific view of persons changes nothing. In another sense, doing so changes everything. This is because the scientific image of persons is incompatible with traditional notions of free will and immortality. Julien is particularly interested in the implications of the scientific image of persons for the question of moral responsibility. With the traditional conception of libertarian free will out of the way, what remains of the notion of moral responsibility, and what are the broader societal implications for the law and for our system of criminal punishment? These are questions that Julien has given public lectures on and that he is further investigating in his current research.