Luca Bonatti

• Ph.D.
• Pompeu Fabra University

Language-of-thought hypothesis (LoTH) is having a profound impact on cognition studies. However, much remains unknown about its basic primitives and generative operations. Infant studies are fundamental, but methodologically very challenging. By distilling potential primitives from work in natural-language semantics, an approach beyond the corset o...

The origins of the human capacity for logically structured thought are still a mystery. Studies on young humans, which can be particularly informative, present conflicting results. Infants seem able to generate competing hypotheses1,2,3 and monitor the certainty or probability of one-shot outcomes,4,5,6,7,8 suggesting the existence of an articulate...

We often express our thoughts through words, but thinking goes well beyond language. Here we focus on an elementary but basic thinking process, disjunction elimination, elicited by elementary visual scenes deprived of linguistic content, describing its neural and oculomotor correlates. We track two main components of a nonverbal deductive process:...

Actions are often learnt incidentally by observing other individuals. How aspects inherent to the social context in which an action is seen affect action learning remains poorly understood. Here we study the effect of a special social signal, the eye gaze of the demonstrator, on the immediate and delayed memory and execution of observed actions. In...

Events are effortlessly segmented out of streaming reality. We can refer to them with verbs, along with aspectual morphemes and adverbs to focalize on specific parts. This suggests that, besides visual clues or statistical structures, also primitives facilitating event individuation may exist. Here we focus on the notion of endpoint arising from te...

Exact arithmetic abilities require symbolic numerals, which constitute a precise representation of quantities, such as the Arabic digits. Numerical thinking, however, also engages an intuitive non-linguistic number sense, the Approximate Number System (ANS). The ANS allows us to discriminate quantities, approximate arithmetic transformations, and e...

The infant as philosopher Visual behaviors, such as a shift in one's gaze or a prolonged stare, can be diagnostic of internal thoughts. Cesana-Arlotti et al. used these measures to demonstrate that preverbal infants can formulate a logical structure called a disjunctive syllogism (see the Perspective by Halberda). That is, if A or B is true, and A...

Two prominent cognitive capacity limitations are the maximal number of objects we can place in working memory (WM) and the maximal number of objects we can track in a display. Both are believed to have a numeric value of 3 or 4, which has led to the proposal that we have a general cognitive capacity, and that this capacity is most likely linked to...

Infants look at physically impossible events longer than at physically possible events, and at improbable events longer than at probable events. Such behaviors are generally interpreted as showing that infants have expectations about future events and are surprised to see them violated. It is unknown, however, whether and under what conditions infa...

We review recent artificial language learning studies, especially those following Endress and Bonatti (Endress AD, Bonatti LL. Rapid learning of syllable classes from a perceptually continuous speech stream. Cognition 2007, 105:247–299), suggesting that humans can deploy a variety of learning mechanisms to acquire artificial languages. Several expe...

ABSTRACT To achieve language proficiency, infants must find the building blocks of speech and master the rules governing their legal combinations. However, these problems are linked: words are also built according to rules. Here, we explored early morphosyntactic sensitivity by testing when and how infants could find either words or within-word str...

Recent research shows that preverbal infants can reason about single-case probabilities without relying on observed frequencies, adapting their predictions to relevant dynamic parameters of the situation (Téglás, Vul, Girotto, Gonzalez, Tenenbaum & Bonatti, 2011; Téglás, Girotto, Gonzalez & Bonatti, 2007). Here we show that intuitions of probabilit...

How do infants predict the next future event, when such a prediction requires estimating the event's probability? The literature suggests that adult humans often fail this task because their probability estimates are affected by heuristics and biases or because they can reason about the frequency of classes of events but not about the probability o...

Background / Purpose: To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object that disappears from sight, it is often assumed that different cues, such as the inferred movement and the understanding of the causal structure of the scene, are integrated into unified analog mental representations.In our experiment, participants predicted the posit...

Many organisms can predict future events from the statistics of past experience, but humans also excel at making predictions by pure reasoning: integrating multiple sources of information, guided by abstract knowledge, to form rational expectations about novel situations, never directly experienced. Here, we show that this reasoning is surprisingly...

To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object that disappears from sight, different sources of information can be exploited: memory of its last visible position, its inferred movement through time, and general understanding of the causal structure of the scene. It is often assumed that these cues are integrated into unified analog menta...

Elementary deduction is the ability of unreflectively drawing conclusions from explicit or implicit premises, on the basis of their logical forms. This ability is involved in many aspects of human cognition and interactions. To date, limited evidence exists on its cortical bases. We propose a model of elementary deduction in which logical inference...

This chapter examines recent results in artificial language learning, mixing general considerations about the mind with detailed descriptions of experiments and experimental material. It begins by recalling some recent results about human abilities to track statistical relations. These results have been taken to support the idea that all human cogn...

We have proposed that consonants give cues primarily about the lexicon, whereas vowels carry cues about syntax. In a study supporting this hypothesis, we showed that when segmenting words from an artificial continuous stream, participants compute statistical relations over consonants, but not over vowels. In the study reported here, we tested the s...

This is the third volume of a three-volume set on The Innate Mind. The extent to which cognitive structures, processes, and contents are innate is one of the central questions concerning the nature of the mind, with important implications for debates throughout the human sciences. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psycho...

Rational agents should integrate probabilities in their predictions about uncertain future events. However, whether humans can do this, and if so, how this ability originates, are controversial issues. Here, we show that 12-month-olds have rational expectations about the future based on estimations of event possibilities, without the need of sampli...

To learn a language, speakers must learn its words and rules from fluent speech; in particular, they must learn dependencies among linguistic classes. We show that when familiarized with a short artificial, subliminally bracketed stream, participants can learn relations about the structure of its words, which specify the classes of syllables occurr...

This paper reviews studies of language processing with the aim of establishing whether any type of statistical information embedded in linguistic signals can be exploited by the language learner. The constraints as to the information that can be so used, we will argue, should be used to inform theories of language acquisition. We present two experi...

M. Peña, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (2002) argued that humans compute nonadjacent statistical relations among syllables in a continuous artificial speech stream to extract words, but they use other computations to determine the structural properties of words. Instead, when participants are familiarized with a segmented stream, structur...

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Infants younger than 1 year do not correctly count the number of objects in a scene by using differences among their properties, unless these differences cross the broad category boundaries separating humans, animals, and artifacts. Here we show that face orientation influences whether 10- and 12-month-old infants count correctly or incorrectly. Wh...

Speech is produced mainly in continuous streams containing several words. Listeners can use the transitional probability (TP) between adjacent and non-adjacent syllables to segment "words" from a continuous stream of artificial speech, much as they use TPs to organize a variety of perceptual continua. It is thus possible that a general-purpose stat...

Learning a language requires both statistical computations to identify words in speech and algebraic-like computations to discover higher level (grammatical) structure. Here we show that these computations can be influenced by subtle cues in the speech signal. After a short familiarization to a continuous speech stream, adult listeners are able to...

How do infants individuate and track objects, and among them objects belonging to their species, when they can only rely on information about the properties of those objects? We propose the Human First Hypothesis (HFH), which posits that infants possess information about their conspecifics and use it to identify and count objects. F. Xu and S. Care...

Interdisciplinary essays on central issues in cognitive science. In the early 1960s, the bold project of the emerging field of cognition was to put the human mind under the scrutiny of rational inquiry, through the conjoined efforts of philosophy, linguistics, computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. Forty years later, cognitive science is a...

Neil Smith and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli,The mind of a savant: language learning and modularity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995. Pp. xviii+243. - - Volume 34 Issue 1 - Luca Bonatti

In the course of addressing this history in terms of a recipe, the author discusses: when logic and psychology were one; logicians abandon psychology; psychologists abandon logic; D. Hilbert and thinking as a symbolic process; G. Gentzen and natural logic; the computer metaphor and functionalism; and empirical psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record...

I question (1) whether Karmiloff-Smith's (1994a,r) criticisms of modularity hit the target and (2) how much better the representational redescription model is. In both cases, “the mystery of the cognitive clock” is problematic for her account.

I argue that SHRUTl's ontology is heavily committed to a representational view of mind. This is best seen when one thinks of how SHRUTI could be developed to account for psychological data on deductive reasoning.

Two theories of propositional deductive reasoning are considered: the mental models of P. N. Johnson-Laird et al (see PA, 79:41765) and the mental logic of M. D. Braine (1994). The model theory is said to account for practically all of the known phenomena of deductive propositional reasoning, offer a general theory of conditionals, account for the...

Two hypotheses on deductive reasoning are under development: mental logic and mental models. It is often accepted that there are overwhelming arguments to reject the mental logic hypothesis. I revise these arguments and claim that they are either not conclusive, or point at problems which are troublesome for the mental model hypothesis as well.

"Graduate Program in Philosophy." Includes abstract. Vita. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 1994. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 390-402).