Jérôme Dokic

RESEARCH

One strand of my current research concerns the affective phenomenology accompanying our ordinary experience of the world, which involves feelings of reality, presence, familiarity and confidence and their opposites, such as feelings of irreality, absence, or Freud’s feeling of uncanniness. I study these affective phenomena in ordinary perception, but also in pathological cases (derealisation, Parkinson’s disease, Capgras’s and Fregoli’s syndromes) and with respect to modified, displaced or extended perception (virtual reality, sensory substitution and augmentation). A recent book (Cognitive Feelings. An Essay on the Affective Interfaces of the Mind) summarizes some of the positions I have taken on these topics.

A second strand is about the relationship between mental states and the self. In particular, I am interested in the perspectival dimension of perception, imagination and memory, i.e., the nature and role of the “point of view” involved in our mental states (for instance, the perspectival differences between field and observer memories).

My latest research project as principal investigator was an ANR project on cognitive aesthetics (SublimAE), which dealt with transformations of self-representations, at various cognitive levels, in intense aesthetic experiences (such as experiences of the sublime). Even though the project is officially complete, I am still working on several papers devoted to awe and the sublime.