My primary research, on the psychology of ordinary mental life, involves the analysis of aspects of everyday human experience that elude explanation.
Elusive problems force one to think beyond customary categories of understanding.
I am especially interested in experiences that may be illuminated by comparisons of childhood and adulthood. Hence the work often includes the study of human development . Through a combination of theoretical analysis and empirical inquiry, projects work toward an account of what the experience in question is and why it comes about. The ultimate goal is to produce claims about strata of mental life that may have escaped notice previously. Experiences I have analyzed thus far include the paradoxical surprise that an object is real, first noted by Freud, that people sometimes feel when they see an object they have felt sure existed but have never seen.