Susanna Schellenberg is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, where she holds a secondary appointment at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Her work focuses on a range of topics in philosophy of mind, epistemology, AI, and neuroscience, including perception, mental representation, consciousness, evidence, knowledge, capacities, and imagination. She is the author of The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence (Oxford University Press, 2018) and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Humboldt Prize, a NEH Fellowship, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for a project on the Neuroscience of Perception.

During her time at the human abilities center, she will be working on a book on subjective perspectives as well as a series of papers on the neural basis of perception. The two projects intersect and build on her previous work in perception. In her book The Unity of Perception, she develops an integrated account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perceptual experience that is sensitive to evidence from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and psychophysics. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence—three key features of perception—are each analyzed in terms of one fundamental property: the employment of perceptual capacities. Indeed, a two-word summary of the book is: capacities first.