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I study cognitive diversity, dynamics, and development. All human learning, reasoning, and inference takes place in a rich cultural, linguistic, and physical context, which imposes elaborate structure on people’s experience. The goal of my research program is to understand how this structure shapes people's concepts, with a focus on space, time, and number representations. To do this, my lab uses methods from disparate disciplines and studies diverse populations. For example, we use cross-cultural methods to investigate how language and culture shape systems of conceptual representation in indigenous Amazonians, developmental methods to identify their ontogenetic starting point in children, and lab-based experimental methods to make causal inferences in adults. This research seeks to explain how the richness and diversity of human cognition arises lawfully from the structure of human experience as it varies across groups, over development, and even from moment-to-moment in the same mind.

I completed my PhD at the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral scholarship at UC Berkeley. I am now a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and will be joining the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UMass Amherst as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025.

Publications

Pitt, Casasanto, & Piantadosi (2023)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

No clear evidence for an innate left-to-right mental number line

Flexible spatial memory in children: Different reference frames on different axes

Pitt, Carstensen, Boni, Piantadosi, & Gibson (2022)

Science Advances

Different reference frames on different axes:
Space and language in indigenous Amazonians

Pitt & Casasanto (2022)

Frontiers in Psychology

Spatial metaphors and the design of everyday things

Pitt, Gibson, & Piantadosi (2022)

Psychological Science

Exact number concepts are limited to the verbal count range

McDougle, Tsay, Pitt, King, Saban, Taylor, & Ivry (2022)

Brain

Continuous manipulation of mental representations is compromised in cerebellar degeneration

Pitt & Casasanto (2022)

Cognitive Science

The order of magnitude:
Why SNARC-like tasks (still) cannot support a generalized magnitude system

Pitt, Ferrigno, Cantlon, Casasanto, Gibson, & Piantadosi (2021)

Science Advances (Cover article)

Spatial concepts of number, size, and time in an indigenous culture

Pitt, Carstensen, Gibson, & Piantadosi (2021)

Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

Variation in spatial concepts: Different frames of reference on different axes

Pitt, Casasanto, Ferrigno, Gibson, & Piantadosi (2020)

Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

Multi-directional mappings in the minds of the Tsimane':

Size, time, and number on three spatial axes

Pitt & Casasanto (2020)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

The correlations in experience principle:
How culture shapes concepts of time and number

Casasanto & Pitt (2018)

Cognitive Science

The faulty magnitude detector:

Why SNARC-like tasks cannot support a Generalized Magnitude System

Pitt, Scales, & Casasanto (2018)

Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

Time and numbers on the fingers:

Dissociating the mental timeline and mental number line 

Pitt & Casasanto (2018)

Cognitive Science

Spatializing emotion:
No evidence for a domain-general magnitude system 

Pitt & Casasanto (2016)

Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

Reading experience shapes the mental timeline

but not the mental number line 

Pitt & Casasanto (2016)

Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

Spatializing emotion:
A mapping of valence or magnitude? 

Pitt & Casasanto (2014)

Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

Experiential origins of the mental number line 

See target article, their rebuttal, and our reply

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