Luca Bonatti is an ICREA Research Professor at the Center for Brain and Cognition of our Department.

He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Mind at Rutgers University, under the supervision of Jerry Fodor. He has been full professor at the University of Nantes, associate professor at the University of Paris 8, and at SISSA/ISAS, Trieste, and visiting professor at the Universities of Budapest, Illes Balears and New York. He is interested in reasoning, language learning, imagination of physical events and infant cognition.

He has promoted a dual model of language acquisition, giving evidence that lexical learning and grammatical learning recruit different acquisition mechanisms. In infant cognition, his work focuses on early abilities of reasoning about the future, and on how basic categories affect infants' organization of experience. Recently, with his collaborators, he has proposed a novel theory of how infants reason about uncertain events and on how their reasoning is affected by what they experience. He has tried to show that infants have intuitions about the future that are not based on their experience of the past, but on their logical abilities of analyzing current events.