Oleksiy Polunin
“The manipulability theories of causality in the space of the multiple mental representations of time flow: can we produce and then break a reliable causality representation?“
The project belongs to cognitive science. It combines the philosophical theories of causality within the manipulability approach and the psychological findings on mental representation of time flow.
The manipulability approach to causality was chosen because it takes an action as a key variable for defining a cause. The goal is to examine how far the human cognitive system contributes to the variation of a mental representation of cause and effect. As a ground of such variation, we take the cognitive representation of time flow.
The project answers the question of whether and if yes, how far the different mental representations of time flow affect the human ability to represent causality; what are the limits of a stable causality representation?
Oleksiy Polunin is a professor at the department of psychology of the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. He has a PhD in psychology from the National Taras Shevchenko University (Kyiv), and a Dr. of Sciences degree (Dr. habil.) in psychology at the Institute of social and political psychology (Kyiv). The main theme of his research is human time processing, which includes such topics as individual timing mechanisms, psychological methods of time studies, the qualitative and quantitative aspects of subjective present time, cognitive coding of time direction, the temporal dimension of human experience, mental representation of time flow and decision making. In recent years he has been focusing more on philosophical topics, especially metaphysics of time.