Publications

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, I use methods from disparate disciplines and study diverse populations. For example, I 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, lab-based experimental methods to make causal inferences in adults, and computational methods to formalize and test competing hypotheses. The results inform an integrated and inclusive theory of conceptual representation, which seeks to explain how the richness and diversity of human cognition arises lawfully from the structure of human experience as it varies across groups, between individuals, and even from moment-to-moment in the same mind.

I completed my PhD at the University of Chicago with Daniel Casasanto and an NSF-funded postdoctoral scholarship in the UC Berkeley Psychology department, where I worked with Steve Piantadosi, Alison Gopnik, and Ted Gibson (at MIT). I am now a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse.

Pitt, Casasanto, & Piantadosi (2023)

Publications

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

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

Spatial metaphors and the design of everyday things

Exact number concepts are limited to the verbal count range

Continuous manipulation of mental representations is compromised in cerebellar degeneration

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

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

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

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

Size, time, and number on three spatial axes

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

The faulty magnitude detector:

Why SNARC-like tasks cannot support a Generalized Magnitude System

Time and numbers on the fingers:

Dissociating the mental timeline and mental number line

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

Reading experience shapes the mental timeline

but not the mental number line

Spatializing emotion: A mapping of valence or magnitude?

Experiential origins of the mental number line

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

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

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

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

Spatializing emotion:
A mapping of valence or magnitude?