Nicolò Cesana-Arlotti

The human ability for linguistic productivity and flexible forms of learning and planning is unparalleled in the natural world. All of this requires integrating a plurality of logical resources. Thus, to understand how infants and children become able to think and talk as we do, I study logical cognition and its development. My approach focuses on preverbal infancy and expands to young children and adults, combining frameworks and methods from developmental psychology, vision science, psycholinguistics, and philosophy. To date, I have uncovered the presence of basic forms of logical representation in infants as young as 12 months. My research program further charts the primitive logical resources that support infants and children striking learning capacities. I also study how maturation, experience, and the acquisition of logical language contribute to the flourishing of decision-making across the preschool years; and how developmentally basic logical computations serve as an interface between language and a-linguistic cognition (e.g., vision) in adults.