Maria investigates the principles governing how we attribute agency, intelligence, and consciousness across diverse substrates, ranging from animals to LLMs and synthetic biological entities. Drawing on her background in philosophy of mind, theories of agency, and naturalistic approaches to free will, she uses experimental philosophy paradigms to investigate how folk ascriptions of mental capacities correlate with philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. Her work focuses on how specific functional, structural, and purely introspective criteria shape folk intuitions about which systems are attributed consciousness.