People | Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione

The overall assumption of my research activity is that cognition is goal-directed, resource-bounded, and adaptively shaped. From this unifying perspective, I focus my research mainly on two areas of interest: decision-making for action (in particular, temporal preferences, long-term goals and risky choices) and belief dynamics, both individual (belief revision and critical thinking) and social (argumentation).

My work is interdisciplinary, combining theoretical analysis, conceptual modelling, behavioral experiments, and field observations. Although my main background is in psychology, I collaborate regularly with primatologists, economists, philosophers, computer scientists and educators to foster our shared research interests.

I am current member of the Board of Directors of the Italian Association of Psychology (AIP, 2021-2026), past President of the Italian Association of Cognitive Sciences (AISC, 2017-2019), and past Chair of the Steering Committe of the European Conference on Argumentation (ECA, 2013-2021). Since 2012, I am Editor-in-Chief of Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy (Springer), and Director of Sistemi Intelligenti (Il Mulino), the leading Italian journal in cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence. I am also in the Editorial Board of the journal Argument & Computation (Taylor & Francis) and of the book series Studies in Logic and Argumentation (College Publications), and I am a member of the Workgroup on Psychology of the publishing house Il Mulino.

Tags:

impulsivity

intertemporal choice

self-control

temporal preferences

time discounting

willpower

Research

I work mostly, albeit not exclusively, on the following topics:

intertemporal choice, temporal preferences, time discounting, self-control, willpower, impulsivity: here I do both experimental work, on humans (adults and children) and non-human primates (mostly capuchin monkeys), and theoretical work, mostly at the interface between philosophy, psychology and economics
argumentation theory, with an emphasis on resource-bounded rationality (e.g. the role of parsimony in enthymeme interpretation), decision-making (e.g. looking at arguments as sequences of decisions), and the integration with other socio-cognitive phenomena (e.g. belief change and trust dynamics): here I combine philosophical analysis with experiments and computational models
goal-oriented behavior, goal processing, intentional action, motivational influences on reasoning: here my contribution is mostly theoretical, occasionally with formal or computational models attached to it

All these topics are pursued in close collaboration with several colleagues, starting with GOAL members, but including also others, such as Elsa Addessi (intertemporal choice in humans and other animals), Mike Beran, Ted Evans, Jeff Stevens (temporal preferences in non-human animals), Anna Borghi, Claudia Scorolli, Bernhard Hommel, Lorenza Colzato (cultural effects on temporal preferences), Francesco Mancini (impulsivity and psychopathology), Francesca Bellagamba (intertemporal choice in children), John Woods (resource-boundedness and enthymeme interpretation), Dale Hample (decision-making in argumentation), Ioana Cionea (cultural differences in argumentative strategies), Serena Villata, Celia Da Costa Pereira and Andrea Tettamanzi (trust dynamics and argumentation).

Finally, recently I had a brief but intense and high-profile experience in scientific journalism, when in 2010 I acted as a postdoc journal keeper for Nature. Details on my entries can be found here.

Projects