Mateusz is the leader of the MCLL and an Associate Professor of psychology at the Jagiellonian University (JU), holding a habilitation in psychology and a Ph.D. in philosophy. Currently, he serves as the director of the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, JU. At the JU, Mateusz is also an associate member of the Centre for Brain Research and a lecturer at the Cognitive Science Programme and at the Doctoral School in the Social Sciences.
His research interests focus mainly on mathematical cognition, i.e., psychological mechanisms of processing numbers and geometric structures, and spatial cognition. He has recently been interested in cognitive and affective dimensions of numerical processing in populations with mathematics learning problems. Mateusz is also keenly involved in research on cognitive artifacts, social cognition, and religious cognition. Currently, he is a Principal Investigator of the following grants: "MCLL founding grant" — a Flagship Project of the Excellence Initiative–Jagiellonian University (2022-2026), "Cognitive artifacts on various time scales: An integrative approach" from National Science Centre, PL (2022–2025), and "Mind, number, space: Spatial-numerical cognition in professional mathematicians" from Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland (2024-2027).
He published three books, including “Foundations of geometric cognition” (Routledge, 2020), and several papers in journals such as Consciousness and Cognition, Psychological Research, Emotion, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, Animal Cognition, Acta Psychologica, PeerJ, Frontiers in Psychology, Foundations of Science, Theory & Psychology, Journal of Computational Neuroscience, Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, Topoi, Synthese, Frontiers in Psychiatry, American Journal of Bioethics, Scientific Reports. He also co-edited five books, e.g., “The Concept of Explanation” (CCPress, 2017) and special issues of Theory & Psychology (2019) and Synthese (2021).
Mateusz is a member of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP), the Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society (MCLS), the Commission for Philosophy of Sciences of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU), and the Polish Society for Cognitive Science. Currently, he cooperates with researchers from the University of Loughborough (UK), University of Graz (Austria), University of Masaryk in Brno (Czech Republic), University of California, San Diego (USA), Leiden University (Nederlands), and University of Potsdam (Germany).
Mateusz received a number of awards and scholarships, including the “Start” Scholarship of the Foundation for Polish Science, the Scientific Prize of “Polityka” (one of the most read Polish weeklies), and the Scholarship of the Minister of Science and Higher Education for outstanding young scientists.
In addition to research, Mateusz is involved in many popular science projects and book translations. Outside working hours, he is a big fan of new technologies and tech gadgets, an FPV drone pilot, and an aerial photographer. He lives in Krakow with his beloved wife and cat.