Position: Director of Research, CNR (since January 2023)
(CV available for downloading)
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 modeling, 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 a 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 Committee 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.