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Welcome to Luca Bonatti's Very Minimal Home Page | ||||
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Hello, thanks for visiting this page (which is very much under construction). Many people who get to know about the PsyScope X project, especially when they are considering spending some money on it, ask the very reasonable question "But who is this Luca Something?" So this page is just to give you few info about me.
I am professor in Cognitive Development at the University of Nantes, France, and research associate at the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. I have also been visiting professor at the University of Budapest, Hungary, at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain, and at New York University.
I got my "laurea" in Philosophy of Language at the University of Milan, Italy, under the supervision of Andrea Bonomi, and my Ph.D. in Philosophy of Mind at Rutgers, under the supervision of Jerry Fodor.
When, too late in my life, I figured out that this was not the optimal way to make money, I decided to switch to the more lucrative field of Cognitive Psychology, and went to Paris, working at the LSCP laboratory, then located at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, as a Marie Curie Fellow. I then entered the University of Paris VIII as an associate professor. I then moved to SISSA, where I joined the excellent Language, Cognition and Development Lab directed by Jacques Mehler, and finally back to France at Nantes.
I am interested in reasoning, language learning, imagination of physical events and infant cognition. I am also interested in sailing. Actually, you should all be. Go here if you want, not just sail, but do the best possible sailing on this planet.
I sometimes run subjects, and sometimes run as a subject. Here is a paper where my brain was studied in details, with unexpected findings. As for my publications, they are few and selected. Thus, here are some few selected publications, in Pdf:
On Language and word learning:
Peña, M., Bonatti, L. L., Nespor, M., & Mehler, J. (2002). Signal-driven computations in speech processing. Science, 298. An attempt to find the scope and limits of statistical computations in word- and rule- learning. And much more, if you read it carefully.
Bonatti, L. L., Peña, M., Nespor, M., & Mehler, J. (2006). Generalization, segmentation and language learning : How to hit Scylla without avoiding Charybdis. Journal of Experimental Psychology:General. This is a clarification of some issues raised by our Science article, and a response to some unfounded critisms it received.
Endress, A. & Bonatti, L. L. (2007). Rapid learning of syllable classes from a perceptually continuous speech stream. Cognition, 105 (2), 247-299. This is a paper to test your patience.It also required a lot of patience to be written. We show that learning quasi-linguistic regularities requires little input and occurs fast, and that experience actually deteriorates this first learning. If you get to the end and understand everything, you win a coffe at our favorite coffe shop. (But really, there are nice things in this paper. I would give a try if I were you.).
Bonatti, L. L., Peña, M., Nespor, M., & Mehler, J. (2005). Linguistic constraints on Statistical Computations. Psychological Science, 16(6), 451-9. An attempt to assess the different role of vowels and consonants in word learning. We show that while language learners can easily compute probability relations among consonants within syllables, the same does not occur for vowels. We argue that this asymmetry is due to the different role of vowels and consonants in language.
Mehler, J., Peña, M., Nespor, M. & Bonatti, L. L. (2006). The "Soul" of language does not use statistics: Reflections on Vowels and Consonants. Cortex, 42, 846-54. This continue the argument of the preceding paper with a different experimental approach.
Bonatti, L. L., Peña, M., Nespor, M., & Mehler, J. (2007). On Consonants, Vowels, Chickens, and Eggs. Psychological Science, 18(10), 924-5. This is a rejoinder to a sharp commentary by Keidel, Jenison, Kluhender & Seidenberg, who try to explain our data about vowels and consonants by using mutual information. I don't think they succeed, but they made a nice attempt.
Toro, J., M., Nespor, M., Mehler, J., & Bonatti, L. (2008). Finding words and rules in a speech stream: functional differences between vowels and consonants. Psychological Science, 19(2), 137-144. This is a very nice paper which continues our work on the differential role of vowels and consonants in speech processing. Just as in the Bonatti et al.'s (2005) paper we found that adults tend to identify lexical elements in a speech stream by using consonants, here we show that they also tend to identify structural generalizations preferentially by using vowels. Indeed, we show that they really have hard time in using consonants even in very simple cases. I am particularly proud of having done this work in collaboration with Juan Manuel Toro, who won the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for Linguistics "for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards". Unfortunately, I was not part of that research. Anyhow, he's a great guy.
On Reasoning:
Bonatti, L. (1994). Propositional reasoning by model? Psychological Review, 101(4). A criticism of the implementations of the mental model theory. A bit old, but still correct in each of its words.
Bonatti, L. (1994). Why should we abandon the mental logic hypothesis? Cognition, 50(1-3), 17-39. (reprinted in J. Mehler, & S. Franck (Eds.), Cognition on cognition. Cambridge, MA, USA: The Mit Press). In those years, an insisting rumor was spreading, suggesting that compelling arguments existed against the Mental Logic Hypothesis and in favor of the Mental Models Hypothesis. This paper showed that it was just a rumor. Oddly enough, that rumor is still circulating. Why, it beats me.
Bonatti, L. (1998). What the Mental Logic-Mental Models controversy is not about, in M. Braine & D. O'Brien (Eds), Mental Logic, (pp. 435-45).Mahwah, NJ, USA: LEA. This is a discussion of some issues related to the representation of logical disjunction in a mental logic theory, if you ever happened to care about such problem in your life.
Bonatti, L. (1998). Why it took so long to bake the mental-logic cake: Historical analysis of the recipe and its ingredients. In M. D. S. Braine, & D. P. O'Brien (Eds.), Mental logic (pp. 7-22). Mahwah, NJ, USA: NJ, USA: LEA. This is sort of a historical introduction to the notion of mental logic.
O'Brien, D., & Bonatti, L. (1999). The semantics of logical connectives and mental logic. Current Psychology of Cognition,18, 87-97. This is, well, a paper on the semantics of logical connectives and mental logic.
Bonatti,L. (1998). Possibilities and real possibilities for a theory of reasoning. In Z. Pylyshyn (Ed.), Essays on Representations (pp. 85--119). Ablex. This is an attempt to figure out what real options exist for a theory of reasoning.
Bonatti, L. (1996). SHRUTI's ontology is representational. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19(2), 326--28. This is a BBS commentary showing that the (very interesting) Shastri and Ajjanagadde's SHRUTI's model of deductive reasoning requires the full power of a representational theory of mind.
Bonatti, L. (2002) . Raisonnement predicatif. In G. Politzer (Ed.), Traité de Sciences Cognitives: Le Raisonnement Paris: Hermès (in French). A sort of introduction to predicative reasoning and the different open theoretical options as I see them.
Reverberi, C., Shallice, T., D'Agostini, S., Skrap, M., & Bonatti, L. L. (2009). Cortical bases of elementary deductive reasoning: Inference, memory, and metadeduction Neuropsychologia, 47(4), 1107-1116. This is a study of frontal patients engaged in simple deductive reasoning tasks, and an attempt to come up with a more refined model of human elementary deductive reasoning.
On infants' early knowledge
Teglas, E., Girotto, V., Gonzalez, M., & Bonatti, L. (2007). Intuitions of probabilities shape expectations about the future at 12 months and beyond PNAS, 104(48).This paper asks whether infants can predict the future without knowing the past. More specifically, it asks whether infants have intuitions about probable future events without having previously collected frequency information about the outcomes of those events. And guess what, ....
Bonatti, L., Frot, E., Zangl, R., & Mehler, J. (2002). The human first hypothesis: Identification of conspecifics and individuation of objects in the young infant. Cognitive Psychology, 44(4).This paper tries to show that specific properties of our species influence the way infants count objects.
Bonatti, L., Frot, E., & Mehler, J. (2005). What face inversion does to infants' numerical abilities. Psychological Science. This paper reports the puzzling result that face orientation changes the way infants count objects. We propose a reason why it should be so.
Bonatti, L. (1997) How Far beyond Modularity? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20, 351-69. This is a critical commentary on Karmiloff-Smith's notion of "modularization", which I think has some problems.
Varia
Bonatti, L.(1991). Introduzione a "Quidditates", in V.W.Quine, Quidditates, Garzanti, (in Italian). This is an introduction I wrote to the Italian edition of a book written by Quine, which contains a brief introduction to Quine's thought. The book was beautiful, and the Italian translation excellent (I did it). However, it must have sold at most 3 copies, including the one I bought. Too bad.
