Benjamin Pitt

Thinking does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, all human learning, memory, and reasoning abilities are constructed in a particular cultural, linguistic, and physical context. In the Cognitive Construction (CoCo) Lab, we study how this context shapes the way people think, even about fundamental concepts like space, time, and numbers. To do this, we conduct behavioral experiments in people of different ages (e.g. children and adults) with different abilities (e.g. blind and sighted) from different cultures (e.g. educated Americans and indigenous Amazonians). Our research seeks to clarify how the diversity of human minds arises from the diversity of human experience, and what this can teach us about the universal mechanisms that make thinking possible.

The lab is recruiting graduate students, post-docs, and a lab manager, to start in the Fall.