He earned a bachelor's degree from the National University of Colombia, where he studied philosophy and neuropsychology, a master's degree from Tufts University, where he studied philosophy and cognitive science (under the direction of Daniel Dennett), and a doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he studied philosophy (under the direction of Jesse Prinz) and cognitive neuroscience (under the direction of Kelly Giovanello). Before coming to Duke, he spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab at Harvard University (under the direction of Daniel Schacter).