Mechanisms of Cognitive Diversity: How Culture Shapes Concepts, by Benjamin Pitt

As part of the BabyLab team meeting, they will have the pleasure of listening to an invited speaker: Benjamin Pitt (Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse).
His talk will be in English and it is entitled :

Mechanisms of Cognitive Diversity: How Culture Shapes Concepts

Abstract From early in life, humans reason not only about the physical environment but also about abstract ideas like time, numbers, and emotions. These domains are fundamental to human behavior but the way people conceptualize them varies dramatically across groups, over development, and even from one context to another in the same individual. By studying this cognitive diversity at many timescales, I seek to clarify the cognitive mechanisms by which cultural experience structures and even enables human reasoning. In this talk, I present three ways culture shapes cognition using data from indigenous Amazonian communities, US American adults, and preschool children. In the first part, I show evidence that the uniquely human ability to reason about exact quantities depends on language. In the second part, I clarify how people conceptualize time, number and other abstract domains according to the spatial structure of the environment, with influences from both the natural and cultural world. Third, I show that even concepts of space itself vary across cultures and contexts, and propose a novel account of this cognitive diversity.

Short Bio Benjamin Pitt is a cognitive scientist studying cognitive diversity, with a focus on space, time, and number concepts. His work uses methods from cross-cultural psychology, developmental science, and psychophysics to investigate the mechanisms that support human cognition. With training at the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley, he is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse. Starting this fall, he will be an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he will lead the Cognitive Construction Lab.