Overview | Research directions | Members | Publications
Overview
We do fundamental research in psychology and neuroscience to understand how the mind represents knowledge.
Research directions
CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE: How do we think about things that we cannot see, hear or touch?
How do we think about the past or plan the future? How can we represent other's people minds, desires and beliefs? How do we retrieve, maintain and manipulate information in our mind's eye?
We are exploring the possibility that the mental machinery evolved to represent and navigate space has been recycled to represent and navigate conceptual information and memories.
LANGUAGE PROCESSING: How do we make sense of words?
How comes that meaningless strings of written signs or arbitrary sounds are related to concepts? How do we retrieve and manipulate conceptual knowledge?
Our research follows a semiotic framework according to which meaning is generated by iconic, indexical and symbolic processes that requires the interaction of the memory, language and sensorimotor system.
CONSCIOUSNESS: What is the difference between conscious and unconscious cognition?
What is the role of consciousness in language processing and it relations with semantics? Why is Siri not yet conscious?
We think that our research on knowledge and semantics may help to provide and answer to these fundamental questions.
Members
- Bottini Roberto, Principal Investigator
- Yangwen Xu, Research fellow
- Lorenzo Vignali, Research fellow
- Federica Sigismondi, Research fellow
- Giuliano Giari, Research fellow
- Anna D’Urso, Research collaborator
Publications
For a complete list see Roberto Bottini personal page