Huge thanks to @annaborghi.bsky.social & @Luisa Lugli for guiding me, @pennypexman.bsky.social & @Valentina Cuccio for careful reviews, and all my friends & colleagues who gave feedback, support, or just kept me sane 😄 Couldn’t have done it without you!
A key insight from my five experiments is that dialogue and social interaction are central to how we acquire, reshape, and co-construct abstract concepts. This highlights the importance of studying them in real-world contexts.
My thesis won 2nd prize among the top 3 in the last 5 years of the Philosophy, Science, Cognition & Semiotics PhD program. Finished in 2022 and mostly published, but this recognition still makes me proud—long nights of curiosity and dedication exploring how we understand abstract concepts.
🎓 My PhD won #BestPhDThesisAward at #UniBo. Moving beyond the abstract-concrete dichotomy, it shows abstract concepts exist in different types—flexible, multidimensional domains shaped by expertise & social-linguistic interaction. Grateful to my mentors & colleagues! Full text shortlink.uk/1mfUb
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Big paper release! ConversationAlign - methods for computing lexical and affective alignment between interlocutors in dyadic conversation transcripts. Open Access in Behavior Research Methods. link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...
Had a great time chatting with Ava about our latest conversation research. If you're interested in what makes for a good conversation, check it out!
www.mindsmatterpodcast.com/s5-ep-01-you...
Spending time with @abstractionerc.bsky.social Team is always nourishing — intellectually during the talk, and physically right after, as this photo reveals.
📣 Abstraction seminars are back!
🗓️ 12 December, 10:30 (CET)
🎙️Prof.ssa Kristina S. Despot
🎓Metaphor literalization strategy: From concrete to abstract and back to concrete again
📍 Bologna
💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/B4H7R)
👉 Save the date & spread the word!
✨@abstractionerc.bsky.social
Don't miss this!!
📣 November's Abstraction seminar is all set too!
🗓️ 19 November, 11:30 - 12:30 (CEST)
📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/xW7mF )
🎆 Join us, details in the figure!
👉 Save the date & spread the word!
Happy with this popular science article about our work (with @lindadrijvers.bsky.social and @judithholler.bsky.social), showing that listeners use co-speech hand gestures to predict upcoming meaning ✋ www.medscape.com/viewarticle/...
Conversational turn-taking feels effortless, but it's a complex dance. We find social context—who you're talking to and what you're talking about—fundamentally changes conversational dynamics in both autistic & TD children. 1/
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... w @chrismmcox.bsky.social
📣 November's Abstraction seminar is all set too!
🗓️ 19 November, 11:30 - 12.30 (CEST)
📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/xW7mF )
🎆 Join us, details in the figure!
👉 Save the date & spread the word!
✨
@abstractionerc.bsky.social
📣 Abstraction seminars are back!
🗓️ 17 October, 10:00 (CEST)
📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/RjrOU)
🎆 Join us for another seminar, details in the figure!
👉 Save the date & spread the word!
✨
@abstractionerc.bsky.social
📣 Abstraction seminars are back!
🗓️ 16 October, 15:00 (CEST)
📍 Bologna (in presenza) or 💻 Microsoft Teams (link: shorturl.at/0fw5a)
🎆 Join us for a thought-provoking seminar, details in the figure!
👉 Save the date & spread the word! ✨
@abstractionerc.bsky.social
📣The chapter "𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆: 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝗺𝘀"
w/@mariannabolog.bsky.social is now online & forthcoming in the #ElsevierEncyclopedia of Language & Linguistics
🔍 Theoretical overview, quantification tools, and behavioral evidence on specificity.
👉 Read: urly.it/31c4nm
@abstractionerc.bsky.social
No better way to finish my post-doc than with a new publication on #specificityeffect in semantic processing!
I’ll really miss the @abstractionerc.bsky.social team, but exciting projects are still underway. Thrilled and optimistic about what’s next! 💫
Cover matter: Navigating Open Research A Guide for Early Career Researchers From CONUL - consortium of national and university libraries #openResearch #irishResearch
Navigating Open Research: A Guide for Early Career Researchers. Great work from the CONUL Research Group. Free to download zenodo.org/records/1702... #irishResearch #openResearch
@caterinavillani.bsky.social presenting our collaboration between @abstractionerc.bsky.social and PRIN 2022 Wemb at #Cogsci2025 in San Francisco: "Development of Linguistic- Mediated Abstraction: Insights from Word Ladders Task".
Well done! 💫
A smiling researcher at CogSci 2025 stands indoors wearing their scientific poster draped like a cape, with charts, graphs, and text visible on the fabric. The background shows a spacious conference hall with people walking and blurred architectural details.
A research poster draped like a cape, showing charts, graphs, and text about collaborative memory and decision-making. The poster includes colorful data plots, grid diagrams, and sections labeled “Introduction,” “Results,” “Model Benchmark,” and “Conclusions.” The bottom includes the researcher’s contact information and social links
Because nothing says “ready to present” like literally wearing your findings at #CogSci2025
Ham Huang leveled up from poster session to superhero mode! 🦸
Kicking off #CogSci2025 at the iconic #InternetArchive with incredible speakers!
Big focus on LLMs— #McClelland asks: Are humans still smarter than AI? Yes: we learn from less data & generalize better!
Just in time for the @cogscisociety.bsky.social conference and the Rumelhart 25th Anniversary Event, the 2023 Rumelhart Prize Issue Honoring Nick Chater is out in TopiCS in Cognitive Science, edited by Mike Oaksford and me:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17568765...
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Getting ready for #COGSCI2025 in San Francisco!
📆 July 31st, 02:37pm
I’ll present a longitudinal study (w/@mariannabolog.bsky.social & @adeleloia.bsky.social) on how school-aged children build taxonomies using the #WordLadders task developed by @abstractionerc.bsky.social
Catch up with us there!
🌟 Had a great time presenting our poster at #ACL2025!
It was a great experience sharing our work with researchers interested in conceptual categories, #abstraction and #generalization, thanks for the insightful discussions and feedback!
wt @andreapdr.bsky.social @mariannabolog.bsky.social
#NLProc
🔊 New paper on #pragmatics!
Rising or falling nuclear accentual movement on the sentence-final word is the key #prosodic cue for distinguishing questions from statements in Italian.
👉 l1nq.com/I8G4d
W/@tomasellor.bsky.social @isabellaboux.bsky.social & #FPulvermüller at #FreieUniversitätBerlin.
Very proud and lucky to work with such a young, brilliant, and enthusiastic researcher. Well done @adeleloia.bsky.social
👏 👏 Next step: we'll bring this work to #CogSci2025🧠✨
Informal moment with @abstractionerc.bsky.social two new postdocs: Laura Occhipinti on the left and Paola Vernillo on the right, both with white shirts. Welcome!
It was such a pleasure to have you here and discuss how abstraction plays out in conversations! (interactingminds.au.dk/events/singl...)
Thought-provoking and #openaccess, Andy Clark reflects on the challenges and potentials of emerging human-AI collaborations in his new commentary "Extending Minds with Generative AI", published by @natcomms.nature.com:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Kicked off my visiting week in #Aarhus with a great talk by @thaliawheatley.bsky.social and inspiring chats with the @interacting-minds.bsky.social group! Many thanks to @fusaroli.bsky.social for hosting me and to @abstractionerc.bsky.social for supporting my work on abstract language in dialogue!
The recordings from our @abstractionerc.bsky.social workshop are now online — definitely worth a listen!
▶️ site.unibo.it/abstraction/...