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)
No clear evidence for an innate left-to-right mental number line
Pitt, Aalaei, & Gopnik (2023)
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Flexible spatial memory in children: Different reference frames on different axes
Pitt, Carstensen, Boni, Piantadosi, & Gibson (2022)
Different reference frames on different axes:
Space and language in indigenous Amazonians
Pitt, Gibson, & Piantadosi (2022)
Exact number concepts are limited to the verbal count range
McDougle, Tsay, Pitt, King, Saban, Taylor, & Ivry (2022)
Continuous manipulation of mental representations is compromised in cerebellar degeneration
Pitt & Casasanto (2022)
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
Press: ScienceNews.org, Spektrum.de, FutureZone.de, ntv.de