Benjamin Pitt uses cross-cultural, developmental, and experimental methods to study how language, culture, and context shape human cognition, especially concepts of space, time, and number.
With an early interest in cognitive science, he has been fascinated by how culture and environment can change how a person thinks about the world. While working as a postdoctoral researcher, Pitt lived in variety of countries and traveled to unique communities to study and explore cognitive diversity. This area of research considers how a person thinks differently based on factors like what local practices they are exposed to, what language they speak, or their geographical location.
A previous project led by Pitt looked at spatial reference frames, or how people think about the space around them. “Sometimes we remember space using our bodies, like ‘on my left’ or ‘on my right’ and that's called egocentric space. In other contexts, people think about the same sorts of things but using what's called allocentric space [centered on other people or an external environment], east/west is an example of allocentric but that varies across cultures,” says Pitt. “I've done work with kids and adults comparing how they think about space and when and why they might use egocentric space versus the allocentric space.”
An interesting case study involved Pitt travelling to the Bolivian Amazon where he studied the Tsimané people. Their unique culture and environment led its members to think in a certain way about space. Their concepts of “up river” and “down river” used to keep track of space differed from the Western viewpoint that focuses on “left to right” (used in many daily tasks such as reading a book or driving a car on the street). Life for the Tsimané involves daily navigation of the local landscape and river, guiding them to think and talk with each other about specific views of space.
In addition to this phenomenon, Pitt conveys, “Everybody is very flexible in which spatial reference frame they use and they habitually use both at the same time. People are often combining them in systematic ways. It's a complicated interaction between the natural setting, the cultural practices, and the cognitive habits, and they're all informing each other.”
Pitt plans to continue his work with the Tsimané as well as branching out to conduct field experiments with Mayan groups in Belize. At UMass Amherst, he will initiate studies with adults and children in his lab, with plans to expand studies to the Children's Museum at Holyoke.
Additionally, Pitt and new graduate student Gracie Zeller are beginning a new project examining the cultural origins of the mental number line (a way our brains associate smaller numbers with the left and larger numbers with the right). They hope to shed some light on whether the mental number line is culturally specific or an innate human characteristic.
When asked about coming to UMass Amherst, Pitt says, “I'm looking forward to getting to know my colleagues here better and thinking about potential projects and collaborations with them…and just being inspired by their ideas and work. I'm excited about building up my lab and as part of that, I'm excited about growing myself as a teacher and mentor, which are aspects of this job that are largely new and that I suspect might be very fulfilling.”