Background

• PhD from Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen‘s University, Belfast, UK (2012).
• For the last 10 years I worked at the Institute of Psychology, Vilnius University, Lithuania.

Research interests
My research interests lie between Cognitive Science (broadly construed) and Anthropology. In particular, Cognitive Science of Religion, Moral and Normative Psychology and Cognitive Anthropology (conducted long-term fieldwork in Mongolia). Also, I have been involved in Experimental Philosophy research.

Current Project
Title: Minds in the wild: conceptualizing and attributing the mental among Mongolians 
Abstract: The term “mind” is as much an everyday word in English language as it is a technical term widely used across various sub-disciplines in the cognitive sciences. And it is not uncommon to see the English-based understanding of mind as representing a universal category of human thought. However, there is little systematic non-English cross-cultural data about the very concept of “mind” or how the mental sphere is categorized and organized. This project will (1) bring a richer cultural perspective to the study of the folk concept of mind by investigating in-depth Mongolian cultural model of mind and comparing it to the dominant English-language based model of mind; and will (2) investigate how Mongolians attribute minds to human and non-human agents. Finally, the project will (3) develop a framework to connect “culture” as cultural models with the postulated universal cognitive features of folk theory of mind.