Biography

Benjamin studies the flexibility and diversity of human cognition, with a focus on space, time, and number. Although these concepts are fundamental to human behavior, they vary systematically across cultures, over development, and even from one moment to the next. To understand the sources of this variation, Benjamin works with a variety of methods and populations. For example, he uses cross-cultural methods to investigate how language and culture shape systems of conceptual representation in indigenous Amazonians, developmental methods to identify their ontogenetic starting point in children, lab-based experimental methods to make causal inferences in adults, and computational methods to formalize and test competing hypotheses. Before joining IAST, he did his doctoral work at the University of Chicago and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.