Steven Piantadosi is a professor at UC Berkeley in psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and heads the computation and language lab (colala). His work uses formal computational methods and behavioral experiments to study how people learn language and create conceptual systems. You can read about some of his work on information and language, language acquisition, ambiguity, and the evolution of human-like cognition. His lab has a variety of ongoing projects including:
- Using compositional "language of thought" models to understand how learners acquire structured, algorithmic concepts in number, language, and conceptual systems.
- Seeking to understand the core properties of language, including features which result from pressures for efficient communication, including ambiguity.
- Collaborations on what makes human cognition unique, comparisons to nonhuman primates in domains like number, recursion, and geometry
- Cross-cultural work in Bolivia on how children learn number, algorithms, and probability.
- Collaborations on neural data supporting learning computational structure, and representing semantics, and concepts
- Work on theory in cognitive science, including the nature of meaning and concepts, the future of linguistics, and innateness
- Work on numerical cognition seeking to understand the way that resource limitations and otherpressures shape our intuitive systems of number.